


Chance Would Be a Fine Thing

by jentheobscure



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (because I’m too soft to write anything too angsty), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Cunnilingus, Eventual Smut, Excessive Fluff, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Fluff and Humor, Light Angst, Meeting the Parents (kinda), Mild Angst, Oral Sex, THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, gratuitous handholding, meet cute (kinda)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:08:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 79,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25535626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jentheobscure/pseuds/jentheobscure
Summary: When Luke and Leia’s 60th birthday approaches, Leia insists on setting Rey up with one of the numerous “nice young men” she apparently keeps on file, which Rey simply cannot stomach, even for her beloved boss, mentor, and mother figure. It's not really a lie she means to tell, that she’s already dating someone, and she certainly does mean to suggest that it's someone Leia already knows. Now doubly excited, Leia insists that Rey bring this mystery man to the party. The night of the party, she’s killing time at the bar across the street caught between thinking up a convincing excuse on behalf of her non-existent boyfriend and finding a way to come clean without making a complete fool of herself. But maybe the man in the suit on the stool next to hers means there's hope for her yet.
Relationships: Background Finn/Rose Tico, Background Leia Organa/Han Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 228
Kudos: 420





	1. A Girl Walks into a Bar

**Author's Note:**

> Here's hoping that the actual story is better than that shitty summary. 
> 
> I've been procrastinating and talking myself in and out of actually posting this for ages, so here goes nothing. This fic mostly exists because my fake-dating-au loving ass just couldn't leave it alone, but I hope some of you will at least enjoy it a little. This is also totally unbeta'd, so let me know if you spot any mistakes and I'll come back and fix them. Tags will also probably be updated as we go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now with a gorgeous graphic made by the even more gorgeous @softhadesvibes! I love love love it!!!

She enters the building in a huff, marching straight over to the bar, plopping the gift bags she’s carrying onto the floor without much concern for whatever’s inside them, and all but collapses onto the barstool.

“Hi, can I get a shot?” she asks the bartender as soon as he approaches. “Something cheap, but preferably not disgusting.”

He nods blankly, unimpressed with her request. The force with which the bottom of the shot glass meets the polished wood of the bar makes a noise, though it’s hardly audible over the din of the other patrons and the nondescript music playing too quietly to catch more than a few notes of. He fills the glass to the brim, she hands him a ten, tells him to keep the change, and throws the shot back like she’s desperate for it.

Upon closer inspection, her expression does seem a little desperate, but nothing about her appearance otherwise seems in line with this look. She’s wearing a black cocktail dress with a fitted bodice that features a neckline cut low enough to show a plush expanse of skin, though not so low that it’s at all revealing. The skirt looks to be silk, rich and smooth and just shiny enough to catch the light. Her makeup is simple but pristine, as is her hair which hangs an inch or two above her slender shoulders and falls in a delicate but deliberate swoop around the right side of her face. She’s lovely, even with a still slightly harried expression muddling her features.

The woman puts her glass down; with her palms flat against the slightly sticky surface of the bar, she takes a deep breath.

It wouldn’t usually be enough to incite such an action from the man sitting next to her—normally, there’s very little in the world that could incite such an action from the man sitting next to her—but there are first times for most things, and another look at her makes him feel as if maybe this ought to be one.

He clears his throat as quietly as possible and then turns to face her.

“Rough day?” he asks.

The woman seems surprised, even a little startled, that he’s spoken to her, but she doesn’t appear displeased that he’s done so.

“It’s about to be,” she answers him, using the leverage of her hands on the bar to spin her stool until she’s turned not quite a quarter of a circle so that she’s facing him.

“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

“I’m on my way to a party that I’d rather not attend. Or, well, no—that’s not entirely true. I’m fine with attending the party; it’s just that I’m a little worried about the reception I’ll get.”

He doesn’t speak, taking a sip of his own drink instead, but he does lift an eyebrow in a show of inquisition.

“I’m…well, I’m meant to have a date with me.”

“Really?” he asks. “What poor bastard was stupid enough to stand you up?”

It’s a flirtatious comment, one that might, under other circumstances, have her hackles rising, but there’s nothing in his tone to suggest he’s actually hitting on her. Instead, he sounds genuinely curious, as if this comment on her looks without actually saying anything about her looks were as banal as any other conversation between two strangers who happened to cross paths—less a seduction, more a statement of fact.

“No, it’s not that,” she corrects him. “I never had one to begin with. It’s just that the person having the party, she sort of got the impression that I was dating someone, but I’m not, and I didn’t have any luck finding someone to bring with me this evening although she pretty much insisted that I should be bring this person who never existed, and now I’m turning up alone, so.” She shrugs, and the man sitting next to her feels the corner of his mouth lift minutely.

“So, just how did she get that impression?”

“Well…I sort of gave it to her.”

“Hmmm,” he hums. “That…sounds like an interesting story.”

“Less so than you might expect,” she quips, and for some reason, the enunciation of these words is the first time his attention is drawn to the lilt of her voice. She’s English, he notes, though he can’t account for why that information should even be worth taking note of.

“Oh, I don’t know. I have famously low expectations about most things. Or, well, I have high expectations, I guess, but almost never any hope of them actually being met. Either way, it’s a low bar, if you’d like to tell me anyway.”

She cocks her head at him, like she can’t quite puzzle something out. “It sounds like you’d like for me to tell you, though I can’t imagine why.”

His face morphs into an exaggerated picture of indifference, and he chuckles a little when he answers her. “Helps pass the time?” He takes another drink. “Truth is, I’m on my way to a party as well, and I’m in no hurry to get there. If you tell me the story, even if it does prove uninteresting, it’ll be a few more minutes that I can justify sitting here, nursing this drink.”

She studies him curiously for another long moment before she shrugs dismissively and replies, “Fair enough.”

She flags down the bartender, orders an ice water, and tells him, “I’m Rey, by the way,” while she waits.

“Ben,” he replies plainly.

When the bartender sits a slender glass in front of her, she thanks him before adjusting her skirt and rotating back toward the man next to her, glass in hand.

She takes a sip, being mindful of the lipstick she rarely bothers with but had put in the extra effort to apply tonight. She returns it to the bartop but keeps her hand around the glass.

“Where to begin?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come say hi on twitter! @jennyb_b8


	2. Why, Why, Why Would I Say That?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This beautiful graphic made my the lovely @hellyjellybean! I am blown away by the generosity and talent in this fandom!

Two weeks before her birthday party, Leia drops by the office Rey shares with Poe to remind them of the upcoming event, as if they could have forgotten with all the party planning that’s been going on around Resistance for the last month and a half. Luke, who prides himself on remaining as hands-off as possible as a partner in the company, has shown up at least once a week to let Leia pester him about details that he couldn’t care less about. There have been caterers and event planners and venue managers and god knows who else in and out of the office for the past six weeks.

Still, when Leia shows up to perch on the small couch that sits against the front wall of their office, neither Rey nor Poe is about to comment.

“Poe, I hope your parents are coming? It’s been ages since we’ve seen Kes and Shara.”

“They’ll be there, Leia. They’re really looking forward to it.”

Leia rolls her eyes and smirks at him—sort of her default. “Well, I might believe it if you told me Shara’s looking forward to it, but I know better than to think that Kes is.”

Poe chuckles. “Ahh, but you always have an open bar, which he thoroughly appreciates.”

“Fair enough!” Leia shouts amusedly.

She turns her attention to Rey, who has been sitting at her desk wondering what it must be like to have people in your life who were there before you were even born. That, and contemplating what on earth she’s going to wear to this thing.

“Rey,” Leia begins, her tone light but vaguely ominous to Rey all the same, “are you planning to bring anyone with you? Because I know some nice young men who would just about fling themselves off a building for a chance at a date with someone like you.”

Rey cringes, “Oh, I don’t know, Leia. I’m not sure I want to be held responsible for nice young men flinging themselves off buildings.”

Leia’s laughter is loud and gruff and unapologetic. It’s one of Rey’s favorite things about her.

“Really though, I know it’s none of my business, but are you dating anyone? Because if not, it’s a crying shame. What I wouldn’t give to be twenty-five again. And with that body and that face? Please!”

“Leiaaa,” Rey whines, which seems to delight both Leia and Poe, who Rey promptly turns to glare at.

“I’m just saying!” Leia cries, holding her manicured hands up in a world-wide gesture of innocence—as if she’s ever been anything of the sort.

Still, the subject won’t be dropped until Leia is satisfied, so Rey sighs and tells her, “I’m not sure if I’ll be bringing anyone with me or not. It…just depends.”

“On?” Leia probes, eyebrows lifting as her chin dips and her mouth purses.

“I’m…not sure if he’ll be working that night. He’s, um, got a lot going on lately, so I don’t know if—”

“So, you are dating someone then! That’s wonderful! And the party’s still two weeks away, so surely that’s enough time for him to clear his schedule! Who is this boy, anyway? Anyone I know?”

It’s hardly the most Leia’s ever interfered in Rey’s life, her well-meaning motherly meddling overwhelming them all at some time or another, but Rey is thrown entirely off her game, frustrated that she hadn’t planned her lie better, or better yet, kept her mouth shut altogether.

It’s all just one big, rambling mess when Rey answers her: “Well, um, yes. Maybe…maybe he’ll be able to make it. I’ll, um, speak to him and see…if he’s…”

“Wonderful!” Leia declares, standing up in a fluid motion that gives away her posh background in a way that much of her other conduct does not. “Well, I’m going to keep making my rounds. You two get back to work or whatever.” She waves her hand flippantly and exits before Rey can even manage to process what exactly she’s just said.

\--

“So, wait,” Finn says that night when he and Rey sit on their couch and share two pizzas and breadsticks, the leftovers of which will be Rey’s lunch for the rest of the week. “You told Leia that you’re dating somebody—somebody she knows—and that you’re going to bring them to her birthday party in two weeks? Girl, what were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t!” Rey shouts with her mouth half full. “I barely got a word in, and when I did, I just sort of accidentally agreed with her! I never actually said she knew him, so maybe I can get by with that one, but I honestly have no idea how in the world she managed to get me to confess to dating someone who doesn’t exist!”

“Oh, Peanut, you are fucked.”

“I know!” Rey lets her face collapse into her hand, the first two fingers of which have a half-eaten breadstick pinched between them. “I just couldn’t take it, Finn. I mean, I love Leia, you know I love Leia, but the idea of letting her set me up with someone, ugggh. I just couldn’t do it, and somehow, all I could think to do was to say that I was already dating someone. Like, why the hell did I not think about the fact that she was definitely going to ask follow-up questions and want me to bring them to the party—which is what got the whole conversation started in the first place! I mean, honestly, what is wrong with me?!”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Peanut,” Finn reassures her. He extends his hand toward her in what Rey expects to be a comforting gesture but turns out to only be an attempt to steal the garlic sauce. When he goes on speaking, he’s got one cheek bulged out with an overly-large bite of pizza. “Well, okay, there are plenty of things wrong with you, but in this case, you just wanted to make Leia happy because you can’t stand the thought of disappointing her, which is maybe a little silly, but is also a sign that you love her, which is very nice, so.”

“Finn, what am I going to do?” Rey grumbles. “How in the world am I supposed to find a single guy who Leia knows and convince them to go to this stupid party with me in the next two weeks? The only people I know that Leia knows are people we work with—which, gross, and also a very bad idea—and clients, which is even worse!”

“If you want, I’ll be your fake boyfriend for the night. We can tell her some story about how between living together and working together, it all just sort of happened.” Finn bats his eyelashes dramatically, still chewing.

Rey rolls her eyes without even meaning to at the ridiculousness of the suggestion. “Oh, please. Everyone knows that you’ve got a huge thing for Rose. Leia’s the one who started the betting pool, for goodness sake!”

“She did what now?” Finn tries to interject, suddenly much more attentive, but Rey ignores him and carries on.

“I’m going to have to come up with some lame-ass excuse about how he wound up with a meeting he couldn’t get out of that will conveniently last the length of the party because she’ll just want him to come meet me there when he’s done, which he can’t do, because he’s not real. But then Leia’s going to insist I bring him to something else, and I’m going to be right back here, trying to figure out who in the hell I can possibly ask to pretend to date me for the benefit of my lovable but devious boss because I’m a grown-arse adult who can’t stand the thought of disappointing her. Ridiculous!”

The conversation goes on in much the same way until they finish eating. Finn pulls out his phone and starts scrolling through contacts, even offering to text Poe and see if he has any ideas.

“Absolutely not! I don’t want anyone else to know about this. I’ll just, I’ll have to think of something. It’ll be fine, right? I’ll figure something out and it will all be totally fine.”

“Sure, Peanut,” Finn says in an overly confident tone, though his face looks anything but.

The noise Rey makes as she falls face-first into the couch cushions is impossible not to laugh at, but Finn is a good enough friend to at least try to muffle it. Rey hits him with a throw pillow anyway.

\--

Rey spends the next two weeks racking her brain for any potentially viable candidates to pretend to date her for an evening. She spends a fair bit of that time thinking about simply telling Leia the truth, sure that the woman would understand the lie, but equally sure that she would take it as a green light to start playing matchmaker, and while she loves Leia—as a boss, as a mentor, as a friend, as the closest thing to a mother Rey’s ever had in her life—she just can’t stomach the idea.

She’s almost entirely unproductive the day of the party. Thankfully, Leia closes the office at noon, begging off for a list of last minute to-dos and reminding them all that she hopes to see them that evening.

Rey spends the intervening hours primping—she shaves her legs and underarms, does a facemask, showers, fixes her hair, puts on actual makeup for the first time that week. She even takes the initiative to hang the dress she’d borrowed from Rose’s older sister in the bathroom to steam out any potential wrinkles while she’s in the shower—though after, it looks pretty much the same as it did when she hung it up. While she works, her thoughts cycle through various possible excuses she can offer Leia when she turns up on her own.

He’d gotten caught up at work. He’d come down with the flu. He’d had to leave town unexpectedly. The issue with all of these excuses is that Leia would almost certainly try to leverage a name out of her, if not a full-blown brunch date or something equally harrowing. When she’s basically reduced her mental capacities to “the dog—which coincidentally, I also don’t have—ate my boyfriend,” Rey slips into her dress and heels, grabs the presents for Luke and Leia she’d wrapped that afternoon, and uses the reflection of her face in the shiny chrome toaster to apply the lipstick she’d waited to put on until the last minute.

Finn had left a half hour before, while Rey was still running around in her bathrobe, having agreed to pick up Rose on his way to the party, despite the fact that they all knew Rose’s apartment was entirely out of the way of the party. Rey pauses at the door, giftbag handles hanging around one wrist while she packs the one clutch she owns with the necessary items from the much larger purse she normally carries—some cash, her bank card, her phone, her housekeys, the lipstick she’d used moments before, a couple pieces of gum, and her ID. She squares herself and leaves her apartment, locking the door behind her.

She splurges on a taxi, mostly because she doesn’t want to contend with the subway in unsteady heels and a borrowed dress, and makes polite chitchat about the weather with the driver until he drops her off across the street from the hotel where the party is being held. When she exits the cab after offering the driver a decent tip, Rey realizes she’s on the sidewalk just outside a bar. It’s a trendier place than she would usually patronize, the drinks sure to be even more overpriced than they generally are in the city, but she’s in no hurry to make an entrance at the party, and she’s pretty sure booze can only help at this point, so she walks hastily in, straight to the bar, and onto an open stool next to a broad-shouldered man with dark hair and a glass of bourbon in front of him…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come say hi on twitter! @jennyb_b8


	3. Insurance, After a Fashion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another short chapter before things really start getting interesting. :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for reading! Everyone has been so sweet about the first couple of chapters, and I'm so glad it sounds like so many of you are enjoying it! I can't even tell you how happy hearing from y'all has made me!
> 
> Just this chapter and one more before it's party time!

By the time she’s finished her story, Ben has finished his drink and the ice in Rey’s water has started to melt.

“So, let me get this straight,” he says, “You need someone to pretend to be your boyfriend so that you don’t disappoint your boss, who frankly sounds like she should stop meddling, and you’re here, hiding, because you don’t have anyone to go with you?”

“Basically, yes.”

“And this… _Leia_ …you said she thinks this person is someone she already knows, but she has no idea how she knows them?”

“Correct.”

Ben’s smirk creases his face in an unfairly flattering way that makes Rey swallow fitfully as she watches him. There’s something about him—apart from being insanely attractive, which there is no debating as far as Rey is concerned, he’s oddly captivating, unlike anyone she’s ever known and yet somehow familiar, comfortable.

His voice pulls her out of her reverie. “What if I told you that I’d go with you to your party?”

“But didn’t you say—aren’t you supposed to be going somewhere too?”

“Rey…I’m going to tell you something, and you’re not going to believe me, but I swear it is the absolute truth.”

Rey’s face wrinkles with curious confusion. “Oh- _kay_?”

Ben sighs heavily, rolling his eyes as they shift down to focus on his empty glass which he begins fiddling with. “I’m supposed to be going to the same party,” he tells her hesitantly.

Rey’s eyes widen and she leans her torso backwards, like the force of the shock is enough to blow her over. “Are you serious?”

He nods.

“So, wait, does that mean you do know Leia, or…?”

Ben huffs through his nose in a way that’s half amused and half frustrated. “Oh yeah. I know Leia.”

“How is that possible?” Rey asks, shaking her head. She’s not quite ready to believe him. “I mean, we’d have met or something by now, right?”

When Ben laughs this time, it’s with more genuine humor. “What, you think Leia doesn’t know anybody that you haven’t met? She knows _everyone_ , Rey.”

“I know that,” Rey snaps, “but she’d have, I don’t know, she’d probably have tried to fix us up or something!”

He laughs out loud now, brief, but deep. “How do you know I’m not one of those ‘nice young men’ she told you about, huh?”

Rey shoots him a squinty, unamused look. It’s actually pretty adorable, he thinks, and he feels the corner of his mouth tick upwards.

“Look, I know that I don’t really know you, but I doubt very seriously, Ben, that anyone would consider you a ‘nice young man.’”

His smirk deepens. “No, probably not. But somehow I think that might work in my favor here.”

“What do you mean?”

“If ‘nice young man’ were your type, you’d have let Leia set you up by now. Really, I’m not even sure she’d believe it if you turned up with some average ‘nice guy.’”

“You don’t even know me,” Rey quips. “Or Leia, for that matter.”

“I told you, I know Leia.”

“Why on earth should I believe you?”

He sighs, shrugs, “Because, it’s true. I’ve known Leia all my life. Han and Luke too.”

The revelation that the alleged acquaintance between Ben and the woman who has been like a mother to her is not a causal one is startling enough but hearing him invoke Han and Luke basically confirms that he’s telling her the truth. It’s certainly a shock, even though he’s been trying to assure her of his honesty from the start and hasn’t really given her reason to doubt him so far.

When she manages to get her head around the idea, she’s left with curiosity. “So, if that’s true—how, exactly, do you know them?”

“You won’t believe it,” he tells her, spinning his glass in both hands, as if he’s already certain of it.

She leans forward on her stool, propping one elbow on the bar and leaning her face against her lifted hand, and says, “Try me.”

“Han and Leia are my parents.”

It’s the kind of news that capable of knocking her off her stool altogether. She’s not far off it as it is.

“You’re fucking with me, right?”

He shakes his head, lifting it to meet her eyes. “Oh, I’m really not.”

“Why does this kind of thing never happen to other people?” she mutters to herself, still reeling under her disbelief.

“She’s never mentioned me?”

Something in his tone—a little sharp, a little sad, a little resigned—makes Rey whip her head back around to face him.

“No,” she tries to reassure him, “she definitely has. But I mean, it’s not like Ben is a very uncommon name, and the only picture she has of you in her office is from when you were a little kid. It’s—you don’t exactly look the same.”

Ben _hmmms_ but says nothing for a moment. Rey uses the straw from her drink to leverage a half-melted ice cube to the top of the glass where she sucks it out and into her mouth, crunching. She’s not sure what to say, not sure if there’s anything _to_ say that isn’t going to be at least a little ridiculous.

She glances at him and catches him studying her. “What do you mean I don’t look the same?”

Rey laughs, pleasantly surprised by his teasing. When it dawns on her that he might actually be waiting for an answer, she snorts quietly at his feigned confusion.

“I don’t know,” she giggles. “For one thing, you’re about five times as big as you are in that photo. Your hair is slightly less messy—but only slightly, mind you.” Rey sees him grin, and goes on. “You certainly dressed better these days, although I have to admit, I would be very curious to see you all grown in a Mickey Mouse shirt. At the very least, it looks like you’ve grown into your ears since then.”

Ben’s cheeks heat to a fetching shade pink, and he groans self-deprecatingly, grumbling under his breath, “You’d be surprised.”

“What was that?”

He shakes his head at her and they share a moment of quiet laughter, neither of them actually looking at the other but sitting comfortably side by side.

She wavers, but can’t help asking him, “Why would you want to do this anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, well, they’re your family. Wouldn’t they know if you were dating someone, much less one of your mother’s employees?”

He studies her skeptically. “You really don’t know much about my family, do you?”

She’s immediately on the defensive, crossing her arms and squinting sharply at him. “I know plenty about your family, Ben.”

He recognizes his misstep right away, offering a placating, “I didn’t mean it like that.” He dips his head and widens his eyes, and while Rey is not normally one to let herself be talked out of her anger, the unexpected pleading sweetness of his expression is enough to soften her.

Ben must see her relax marginally because he goes on, “I just meant that you must not have heard the whole story about…well, about me. It’s too much to explain right now, and I’m not sure you’d care to know anyway, but suffice it to say that my parents weren’t always as great at being parents as they’d like to believe, and I wasn’t always easy to deal with either, and it led to some…rocky years. I moved away for college and stayed gone until last year.”

Rey listens attentively, torn between wanting her questions answered and not wanting to push him to reveal more than he’s willing to.

“I guess that’s the answer to your question really,” Ben sighs.

“Huh?”

“You asked me why I would want to do this. That’s why.”

She wrinkles her brow, curls her lip, shakes her head at him, all meant to suggest that he should explain.

Ben huffs a laugh and catches her eyes dead on. His somewhat cocky tone has returned when he tells her, “Let me put it this way. Leia only meddles when she cares. That story you just told me? She definitely cares about you. And given that things with me and my parents are still…a little tenuous, I think walking in with a beautiful girl who’s clearly beloved can really only help my case. If nothing else, the idea of me having a girlfriend, especially one that she already likes, will at least be enough to pacify her until I can leave without seeming like a jackass for cutting out early on my mom’s birthday party.”

“So basically,” Rey grins, “you’re telling me that this is a win-win situation for both of us?”

“A win-win- _win_ ,” he corrects. “I have no doubt that Leia will consider it a personal victory as well, although she’s almost definitely going to make at least one inappropriate comment about marriage and/or grandchildren.”

Rey lets out a loud guffawing laugh, throwing her head back and putting her perfect teeth on display. The line of her pale neck is enough to make Ben’s breath catch momentarily, and while he _knows_ that it’s a horrible idea, one he should stay well away from, the thought of an evening spent with this gorgeous woman at his side, with her bright smile, her soft skin, her narrow hips, maybe even the chance to kiss her a time or two—well, it certainly appeals to him, even if he knows better.

He’s seconds away from slipping into decidedly less PG-13 fantasies about the girl next to him when she asks him, “You really think we can pull this off?”

He shrugs one shoulder, “I think it’s certainly worth a shot. What have you got to lose?”

“Only my pride and the respect of a woman who’s very important to me, not to mention all of my colleagues who would undoubtedly find out about the whole thing if it all goes to shit. But yeah, sure, other than that, nothing to lose!”

They both laugh softly once again, smiling at each other like they’re sharing a secret between them, which Rey supposes they are now.

When Ben lifts the hand she’d had flat on the bar, engulfing it in his palm that’s nearly twice the size of her own before pressing his full, soft lips gently against the skin stretched over her knuckles, Rey feels her breathing speed up. It’s the kind of cliché she’s not usually subject to, but that something about him that she can’t quite put her finger on has her all but shivering with the attention.

He lifts his face scant inches from her fingers, looking up at her from underneath his thick, dark eyelashes and murmurs, “What do you say? Wanna let me be your boyfriend, Rey?”

If she could manage to say anything, she’s pretty sure they both know what it would be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come say hi on twitter! @jennyb_b8


	4. Share and Share Alike

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for the support! I'm so glad people other than me are having fun with this story!
> 
> This is the last chapter before we get to the actual party, but I promise, it's necessary. Here, have a hastily made visual to make up for it!

“So, as your boyfriend, what should I know about you?”

“Is this a trick question?” Rey giggles.

“Hey, if we’re going to convince anyone, much less my mother, that we’ve been dating for—wait, how long have we been dating?”

“Huh. I actually…don’t know? I don’t think I told her how long, so I guess we can just—” Rey trails off.

Ben nods once, “Okay, so what do you think then? A month? Two? It’ll be easier to explain anything we don’t know about each other if we say we haven’t been together very long.”

“Not to mention why neither of us told her sooner. Wait, it won’t be weird that your dad and Luke didn’t know either, right?”

“God no. I’m even less likely to tell Han or Luke anything than I am mom.”

“I get the feeling there’s a story behind that,” Rey says, her tone more inquisitive than anything else, but when she notices the clench of Ben’s jaw, she decides to maybe leave it alone for the time being. “But maybe that’s one of those things I wouldn’t know yet?”

He looks immensely relieved which makes Rey smile at him in a way that’s possibly a little too fond for someone she met a half-hour or so ago.

“Ok, let’s see,” he begins, “I’m 34, my birthday is in November, the nineteenth. I went to college at Stanford and got a degree in business administration, and then I got my masters there too. Uhhh… I assume you know that I don’t have any siblings,” Rey nods, so he goes on. “Really, there’s not much to tell. I spent several years after college working for a firm in Palo Alto that specialized in buying out businesses that were going under and either selling off the assets or revitalizing them. It was a prestigious firm, so I stayed, but it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing.”

“So, what made you decide to move back then?” Rey asks.

“My friend Gwen, we were in grad school together, and then she worked with me at Empire for a while after that. She left about a year before I did to form her own startup, and she’s English too, actually, so she decided she would rather be on the east coast so that it was a little more accessible for her family. She called me last year and said she needed a VP, asked if I’d be interested.”

“Wow, Ben, that’s actually…pretty cool. Is it the same kind of work, or?”

“Not exactly, but we do offer some of the same services. First Order is a lot less cutthroat, for one thing. We do some of the same work that you guys do Resistance, actually, but we still tend to target failing businesses rather than new or aspiring ones. Unlike Empire, though, we try to help them manage their affairs so that they can stay open, move into other sectors, that kind of thing.”

Rey looks pleased, even impressed, and Ben practically preens. He rolls his eyes at himself for the way he can feel his shoulders rolling back, his chin lifting slightly. He’s proud of himself, proud of the way she looks proud of him, and it doesn’t make sense that this girl he just met thinking well of him should make him feel this way.

In an effort to get away from that particular line of thought, Ben pivots to Rey. “What about you?” he asks.

“Hmm, let’s see,” she begins, tapping a forefinger against her chin, playfully contemplative. It’s kind of insanely cute. “Well, I’m obviously from England. It’s a long story, but I basically grew up on my own. I don’t have siblings or anything, and I grew up in foster care, which was sort of awful, but then I got a scholarship to attend CUNY, so I moved here and just never left. I have a degree in information systems management, so I basically work with our clients to make sure they’re using appropriate technology for their needs and that they understand how to make technology work for them, really. I live with my best friend Finn; you’ll meet him tonight, as well as Rose, who’s practically his girlfriend, and our other friend Poe—they both work with us.”

“Wait, wait, wait—Poe _Dameron_?”

“Yeah, do you know him?” Rey asks, surprised.

“Oh yeah. We were friends when we were kids, but I haven’t seen him since I started prep school when I was 15.”

“Oh, wow. Well, I guess I should tell you that we share an office, Poe and I.”

Ben’s expression is entirely serious when he clutches her hand in both of his and tells her, “I’m so sorry.”

It doesn’t take more than a minute for both of them to burst into laughter that they do their best to stifle in the bar that has grown much more crowded than either of them realized.

Ben leans in a little closer to ask Rey if there’s anything else he should know.

“Just trivia, I guess?” Rey replies with a small shrug that draws Ben’s attention to the bare skin of her shoulders, muscled and delicate and sexy in a way that he fears may prove to be a problem before the night is out. “My birthday is the tenth of April, so I turned 25 a few months ago. I love food—I will eat just about anything. My favorite color is yellow. I’m not sure what else to tell you,” she giggles self-consciously.

Ben nods, satisfied. “Okay, so we’ve been dating about two months. Met in a bar?”

“A restaurant, maybe? I think it’s better to stay close to the truth, but to be honest, I don’t go out much, at least not to bars, and when I do I’m almost always with my friends, so it would be a little odd for them not to know about you if I’d met you while I was with them.”

“That makes sense,” he concedes. “Although, if you live with your best friend, wouldn’t it be kind of impossible for him not to know you’ve been dating someone for two months?”

“It would, but Finn already knows about the whole fake-boyfriend thing, so I’ll just try to catch him on our way in and sort of fill in the blanks. We can say I asked him not to tell anyone since I work for your mother.”

“Great. So, two months, kept it quiet, maybe we didn’t want to tell my family until we had a better idea of what things between us were?”

“Works for me, because I’m sure that that’ll be the first thing your parents ask,” Rey laughs brightly.

“So, I guess you know all three of them, huh?”

“Oh, yeah, I do,” she confirms. “I met Luke at the office not long after I started, and then I met Han at some company dinner or something, and we wound up talking about cars—which I probably should have also mentioned, that’s kind of a hobby of mine—and then I helped him work on a couple things this summer. Leia’s the only one of them that I know very well, I guess, but I definitely know them all.”

“That actually probably makes things easier,” Ben says, trying to be reassuring. “Ok so, what else?” he asks a moment later. “Anything else we need to cover before we go?”

“I can’t think of anything else. I mean, I’m not really the ‘call you baby and swoon all over you’ type, but is there anything you think we should or shouldn’t do, like, nicknames, PDA, that kind of thing? I don’t really date much, to be honest, which I guess you probably could have assumed given the whole fake boyfriend scenario we’re discussing here,” embarrassment is starting to tinge her voice, for some reason not wanting Ben to think of her as someone who couldn’t get a date if she wanted one.

Either he realizes that’s what’s happening or he just has excellent timing, because he takes over for her: “I don’t date much either. I guess we can just play it by ear? I mean, it’s not like anyone’s going to insist we make out in front of them or anything, so we’ll figure it out as we go.”

Rey nods, exhaling heavily, comforted by his continued steadiness as her own nervousness grows.

“Relax, sweetheart,” he tells her, squeezing the hand he’s still holding in his own.

Rey feels her face heat slightly. She’s not quite sure how to feel about the term of endearment, mostly because she knows exactly how it’s making her feel, and it’s not something she had expected to experience with this man who’s basically a total stranger.

“Sweetheart?” she asks, clearing her throat around the way her voice threatens to falter on the word.

Ben shrugs, the confident smirk returning to his face. “Something I was trying. You don’t like it?”

He looks more invested in her answer than Rey had honestly expected him to, so she grins at him, allowing herself to flirt guiltlessly for a moment as she says, “No, no—I definitely like it.”

Ben looks pleased with himself, which pleases Rey all the more.

“We should probably go, right?” Rey says, breaking the mounting tension between them. Part of her wants to know what would happen if she and Ben spent the rest of their evening on these barstools, but she knows that tonight is not the night for that, that there will probably never be a night for that for the two of them.

Ben agrees and starts to stand, releasing Rey’s hand so that she can collect the gift bags she’d left sitting on the ground beneath her stool since she first came in.

When she notices that Ben isn’t carrying any similar baggage, she hesitates to ask, but decides it’s in the interest of this whole charade to test this particular theory.

“Ben, are you…did you happen to bring gifts of any sort?”

His voice is unassuming when he answers, and it makes Rey think that he’s entirely missed what she’s trying to hint at. “I got a card for my mom.” His voice shifts to something more suspicious as he asks, “Why?”

She rolls her eyes and huffs a little impatiently, frustrated that he doesn’t seem to see the issue. “Because, Ben, don’t you think it would look a little strange for us to turn up with gifts from me and a card from you?”

“I guess,” he hedges, “but it’s not like I can run into the hotel giftshop and pick something up, unless you think an ‘I heart NYC’ mug is on Leia’s wishlist.”

She tries very hard not to be amused, but she’s not quite sure she manages it if the twitch of his lips is anything to go on.

“Can I ask—” she hesitates; she doesn’t want to offend him with the question but feeling as if she needs it answered all the same. “Can I ask why you just bought a card? Not that that isn’t thoughtful, but—”

She trails off, leaving Ben to pick up the conversation.

“It was sort of last minute, me coming tonight.”

“How is that possible? Leia’s been planning this thing for, like, two months. We’ve had people in the office nearly everyday since the end of July. She sent out invitations last month!”

“Yes, and I got an invitation, but—”

“But what, Ben?” Rey prodded, not unkindly.

“But I didn’t think I was supposed to,” he mutters.

“Ben, what—”

“I thought that some party planner had just gone through mom’s contacts and sent invitations to all of them or something. I didn’t think that she actually meant for me to get one, so I didn’t plan to come.”

“Oh, Ben. Of course she wanted you to come!”

“Well, I know that now! But until a couple of days ago when she called to ask if I was coming, I didn’t think I should, and after that I didn’t have time to think of anything that wasn’t, like, a scented candle that she probably wouldn’t even like the smell of or something equally stupid.”

Rey sighs. She’s sad on his behalf, because despite the fact that he looks like he wishes he hadn’t told her the truth about it, he did, and Rey thinks that in telling her the truth about it, Ben had probably revealed more than he meant to about himself and his mother and the state of things between them. She thinks that if she left him to it, Ben would probably let his thoughts overtake him, retreating into his own mind to worry. In an effort to prevent just that, Rey puts a hand on his forearm to draw his focus back to her.

“We’ll tell Luke his gift is from both of us—I bought him a sweater to replace this terrible brown thing that he wears all the time.”

“He still has that?!”

“Unfortunately,” Rey chuckles at Ben’s dramatic response. “I actually wound up getting Leia two things. I got her a gift package for this new spa she’s been talking about, so I’ll give her that, but then I saw this cute vintage picture frame that reminded me of her at a craft market Rose and I went to a few weeks ago, so I guess you can give her that. And your card, of course.”

He’s already shaking his head before he starts speaking. “Rey, no, I’m not going take credit for your thoughtfulness, or the money you spent.”

“Ben, it’s a twenty dollar photo frame, not a kidney or a new car. It’s really fine.”

“Rey—” he starts to object further, but she holds a hand up to interrupt him.

“Ben, it’s going to make me look like a terrible girlfriend who didn’t remind you to buy your mother a birthday gift. You’ll give her the frame, and if it’ll make you feel better, you can buy me a burger or something to make up for it.”

She doesn’t know what it was she said that seems to have entirely reversed his demeanor, but Ben is suddenly docile, his hazel eyes wide and sparking mischievously.

“Promise?”

“What?”

“Do you promise you’ll let me buy you dinner?” he asks. “To make up for the picture frame, I mean.”

“Oh,” Rey falters, “you really don’t have to—”

“I’d like to,” Ben insists.

Rey blushes, but concedes, which seems to please him.

“So, should we go then?” he asks her, taking the giftbags from her into his right hand and offering her his left.

She slots her fingers between his much larger ones, and they head for the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come say hi on twitter! @jennyb_b8


	5. Play Along

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's party time, babies!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dedicating this chapter to the [lovely Lane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlaMac0801/pseuds/AlaMac0801) as a thank you for the much needed cheerleading she gave me for this story, and for being a generally delightful human being.
> 
> Also featuring another hastily made not-really-a-moodboard by me because I am too lazy to make a proper one. As always, this thing is totally unedited (see my previous comment about being lazy), so please let me know if you see anything in here that needs fixing. 
> 
> Happy reading!

It doesn’t take more than a few minutes for the pair to wait out the traffic and cross the street to the enormous, trendy hotel that held the ballroom Leia had finally settled on for the party venue. Been keeps hold of both the bags and Rey’s hand as a man in a bland suit—a security guard, Rey thinks—opens the door for them.

Ben nods for Rey to head in first, allowing himself to be led by their intertwined fingers. Just inside the doorway, he finds himself more or less pressed up against Rey’s back as she freezes, her head swiveling around to take in the opulence of the hotel’s foyer.

“Holy shit,” she whispers, near silently.

Ben leans forwards and whispers in her ear, “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Rey says quietly in reply. “Just suddenly feeling a little…underdressed.”

“Hey,” Ben says, a little louder, words still quiet under the comings and goings in the bustling lobby. He tugs her hand until she’s turned around facing him, at which point he catches her eyes. Looking at her though, it’s him who falters. He wants to tell her that she’s beautiful, that he’d thought so well before he’d known who she was, that that had been what prompted him to speak to her in the first place. He wants to say all of that, but it’s too much too fast, and he’s quickly realizing that he’s going to have a hard time remembering that that’s not what this evening is, even if that’s how it’s meant to seem to everyone around them.

In the end, he settles for assuring her, “You look great,” and though it sounds hollow to his ears, he hopes it’s more comforting to her.

She mutters a thank you, rolls her shoulders back, takes a deep breath, and starts moving again, tugging Ben along once more. She pulls him straight over to the concierge desk, waits patiently while he provides an older woman with directions to some theatre or other, and then steps up to ask if he can point them in the direction of the Albany Room.

Ben isn’t used to taking a backseat on, well, much of anything, but watching Rey take charge, even of these small actions, it sort of delights him. He understands with sudden revelatory clarity just what it is that has made Leia care for this girl enough to meddle in her life well beyond the purview of an average employer. She’s sweet and uncertain, but there’s a bravery, a tenacity even, that lurks just under the surface and manifests itself whenever she even begins to let her hesitance get the better of her. In addition to being indisputably gorgeous and unfairly tempting, she’s bold and smart and compassionate, and Ben thinks he might understand his mother’s dismay at Rey not having men and women beating down her door trying to date her.

They reach the ballroom where the party is already well underway, and Ben asks Rey if she’s ready. She nods in the affirmative and they enter the open doorway, hand in hand.

The shift between standing in the hallway and standing just inside the door of the party is immense. Inside, the music is loud and the guests are louder. There are probably at least two hundred people in the room, big enough to house them all comfortably, as well as staff who move around in all directions carrying trays of appetizers and glasses guests have discarded. The lights are dimmed for the occasion, the room tinted faintly blue and elegantly decorated with floral arrangements, draperies, and bundles of gold balloons in every corner. There’s a table pushed against the right-hand wall, draped in a plush cream tablecloth and piled high with gifts of all shapes and sizes. There’s a bar on the opposite wall where cocktails and liquor are flowing freely, and next to that sits a table holding two enormous cakes, decorated in contrasting but complementary styles, and Ben knows that Luke’s will be vanilla bean, Leia’s chocolate raspberry.

He leans in close enough for to be heard over the volume of the room and asks, “Where to?”

She’s still taking everything in, her head swiveling around much as it had in the lobby, but she still answers him. “I should see if I can find Finn. And I guess we should find your parents.”

He makes a face at her suggestion, mostly for her amusement, and asks what Finn looks like, figuring he’ll have better luck trying to spot him over the crowd than she will through it. Rey describes him, says she thinks he was wearing a gray suit, which doesn’t really narrow the pool much. Still, Ben manages to spot someone who he thinks might be the man she’s looking for and points him out for her confirmation.

Ben assumes he’s the right guy because Rey is suddenly leading him by the hand once more, and he rolls his eyes at himself when he realizes he’s pleased that she has yet to turn him loose, even if he knows that that’s sort of the point of the evening.

He’s headed for the bar when they catch him, Rey calling loudly to draw his attention.

“Peanut!” she shouts, and sure enough, the man—Finn, Ben reminds himself—whips his head in their direction, a smile spreading over his features as soon as he notices her.

“Peanut!” he calls back, “You’re here! I wondered if you were going to show up. I think Leia is about ready to send out a search party! Who’s this then?” he asks, lifting his face to observe Ben and then shooting his friend a cheeky look when he notices their joined hands.

“Finn, this is Ben,” Rey grins, gesturing to him with her unoccupied left hand. Ben extends his right to Finn, shaking hands and exchanging polite hellos. “So, long, _long_ story,” Rey says, focusing back on her friend, “but Ben has generously agreed to play along,” she emphasizes the words pointedly. “It just so happens that he was already planning to attend the party anyway, because it just so happens that he’s Leia’s son.”

Finn, whose expressions have thus far suggested that he’s following the subtext of Rey’s statements, whips his head to face him, all wide eyes and slack jaw. “He’s _what_?”

“Leia’s son,” Rey enunciates, like she thinks he might not have heard her rather than that he might be flabbergasted by what he did, in fact, hear. “I told you it’s a long story. Look, in the interest of pulling this off, I need you to back us up, okay?”

Finn nods absently, still eyeing Ben curiously. “Yeah, yeah, sure, Peanut, you got it. What do you need me to do?”

Ben flexes his jaw, a nervous habit he’d developed as a teenager, likely as a result of all the barbed things he’d kept himself from saying, and reinforced during his years working at Empire Administration. He’s not strictly comfortable under Finn’s scrutiny, but he supposes that’s what he gets as the boyfriend, even if only for the evening.

“If it comes up—and let’s be honest, it probably will—I just need you to tell whoever it is that asks that you knew that I’ve been seeing Ben for a couple of months, okay? We didn’t want to say anything until we were sure if it was going anywhere, blah blah, and I asked you not to say anything to anyone until we were ready to, but you knew, okay?”

“Sure, Peanut. A couple of months, I knew, you were keeping it on the DL, I got it.”

Rey leans forward and pecks him on the cheek, thanking him and telling him that she owes him one, which Finn waves off, smiling again.

“We should go find Leia, and it looks like your date is headed this way, so we’ll catch up with you, okay?”

At the mention of his date, Finn spins hastily to look over his shoulder, his face taking on an entirely new shade of happiness as a petite Asian woman in a sparkly dress approaches them. He sweeps an arm around her back, and they stay just long enough for Rey to say, “You look beautiful, Rosie!” before the two of them wander off, Ben faintly hearing the woman ask “Who was that?” as they retreat.

Ben asks if she wants to get a drink or anything first, but Rey assures him that they’ll be much better off to get it out of the way, while she has momentum, she says.

“Whatever you say, sweetheart,” Ben chuckles. He lifts her hand that he’s already holding, kissing the edge of her palm where it meets her thumb and grinning at her, just in time for his mother to catch sight of them.

“Ben!” she crows, lifting the hem of her dress and bustling toward them, and then when she gets a little closer, they hear her surprised, “Rey?”

“Leia,” Rey smiles, leaning forward to peck her cheek, which Leia copies simultaneously, “Happy birthday!”

“Well, it’s not technically until Sunday but I didn’t think sending half the city to work on Monday morning with raging hangovers was a good idea, so here we are! But thank you, darling.” She pivots minutely, casting a haughty and amused look up at her son. “Benny,” she drawls, lifting an eyebrow and dropping her eyes to where he’s still holding Rey’s hand, a little tighter than before in fact.

“Mom,” Ben replies, doing his best to mimic her tone. “Nice party,” he smirks.

Leia rolls her eyes at him, but quips, “So are you going to explain to me why the fuck you’re wrapped around my protégé? Or better yet, why the fuck neither one of you felt like you should tell me anything about it before now?”

“That’s mostly my fault,” Rey asserts, stepping in to take the weight of Leia’s pointed gaze.

“Oh?”

Rey glances up at him and then back to Leia. “You know I don’t date much; I just thought it would be better to know what this,” she gestures between herself and Ben, “is before we said anything, given the circumstances.”

“I see,” Leia says flatly; she turns back to Ben. “And you?”

“What about me?” Ben grumbles, wrinkling his brow at her.

“You’re just going to let this lovely young woman take the heat for the _blatant_ lie of omission you have committed against your beloved mother?”

It’s dramatic, even for her, which is saying something given that dramatic is sort of the Skywalker brand. Ben smirks, looks down at Rey who is already looking at him, a little nervously it seems. He winks at her and turns back toward Leia.

“I think she’s doing just fine without my interference.”

It’s the right answer for Leia, and he suspects for Rey too.

“Good boy,” Leia grins. She grabs his lapel and drags him down until she can press a kiss to his forehead, which she does, just before patting his cheek a little sharply.

Ben rolls his eyes and leans back up to his full height. When he looks toward Rey, he finds her watching them with barely restrained laughter pulling at her lips. Ben tries to look contemptuous, but he can feel the fondness in his expression, surely visible to her, and he’s pretty sure he’s going to break entirely at the first glimpse of her perfect, pearly teeth.

Lucky for him, before he gets the chance to embarrass himself, Leia intervenes.

“One of those for me?” she dips her chin toward the gift bags that Ben’s still holding.

“Oh, yes! Of course!” Rey chimes, brightening immediately.

Ben opens his palm and holds it out to Rey, allowing her to select the correct bag and hand it to Leia. She turns to Ben and asks, “Did you drop your card in there earlier?”

“Oh, no, I uh—” he reaches into the inner pocket of his suit jacket, pulling out a wide, rectangular, crisp white envelope and holding it out to his mother. “Maybe read it later.”

She grins at him and doesn’t object. Instead she digs into the bag under the tissue paper. She hits another envelope first and pulls it out, lifting her gaze to pair in front of her. “Can I open this one?” she jokes, making Rey giggle, tilting her head until it rests lightly on Ben’s bicep.

He draws a deep breath as Rey affirms that Leia should go ahead.

She pulls out a folded certificate that seems to outline a list of spa services that Leia and her guest will be able to choose from.

Ben has no idea what makes him say, “That one’s from Rey,” but he really, really wishes that whatever it was hadn’t, especially when Leia sarcastically says, “Yes, Ben, funnily enough, I did actually assume that my grown son didn’t buy me a gift certificate for a girls day out.”

Rey turns her face inward, and he feels the vibrations of her laughter travel up the length of his arm. It’s enough to send a shiver down his spine, and Ben is starting to feel desperate to get himself together.

“Thank you, darling,” Leia says to Rey. “You’re coming with me, of course!”

“I don’t want you to feel obligated to bring me. You should—”

“Rey, don’t be ridiculous, of course you’re coming with me,” she says dismissively, already reaching back into the bag. “What’s this?” she asks as she pulls the frame out of the bag and unwraps the tissue paper Rey had put it in to protect it.

She pushes the paper back until the frame is fully visible, and given that it’s the first glimpse Ben has had of the thing, he thinks that Rey did a remarkably good job catering to his mother’s tastes.

“It’s lovely, Ben,” she grins up at him.

Rey squeezes his hand and smiles up at him, looking for all the world as if she’s pleased that Ben had chosen his gift thoughtfully, as if he’d had anything to do with it.

He smiles softly back at her and keeps his eyes on her face as he replies to Leia, “Yeah, well, Rey mentioned that you didn’t have any recent pictures in your office, so—”

Rey interrupts him, fondly disgruntled, “Noooo,” she croons, “what I said was that she didn’t have any recent photos of you in there. There’s one of me from last summer.” She grins teasingly up at him, and Ben can’t help but return the expression. He scrunches his nose at her, then leans down and brushes it over her hairline. When she squeaks out a quiet noise of surprise he’s sure he’s not meant to hear, Ben gets brave and presses his lips to the side of her head.

“Just something you were trying?” she whispers loud enough for only him to hear, and between the playful words, her cheeky smirk, and the wave of pleasure that shoots through him at the secrecy, the _intimacy_ of the gesture, Ben practically shivers.

Leia clears her throat pointedly, but when they both turn to her, she’s smiling in that mischievous way of hers.

She looks like she’s just about to start in on some severe teasing when something draws her attention behind them, and instead she hollers, “Han! Your son is here! Luke, you come too!”

The two older men walk up, though Ben and Rey can’t see them until they’ve circled around the pair, Han clapping a large hand on his son’s shoulder as he goes. Luke is in a tweed suit that’s not unfashionable but has certainly seen better days, and Ben would bet good money that Leia had bullied him into wearing it; Han is wearing a gray suit, looking decidedly professorial, which leaves Ben fighting off a grin.

“He’s not my son, why did I have to come over?” Luke grumbles, only half kidding.

“Because we brought you a present,” Rey tells him, paying no mind to the way that he and Han both widen their eyes at the revelation of just who it is pressed against Ben’s side, Leia lifting her eyebrows, pursing her lips smugly. “I assume that at least is worth the trip?”

“Rey,” Luke drawls levelly, “you look lovely. Ben, hand the bag over.”

It makes Rey giggle, and that’s enough to make Ben smile apparently—and what the hell has gotten into him since he met this girl two hours ago, he wonders—and so he passes Luke the bag with his grin still in place; it appears to startle Luke a little, which really only delights Ben more.

While Luke unwraps the sweater and banters with Leia and Rey about how he doesn’t think he actually needs a replacement for his other one, but he’s always glad to have a something new to add to his rotation of cardigans, Han sidles up to his son and pins him with a steadfast and largely expressionless look.

“You gonna tell us what that’s all about, kid?” he asks, nodding none too subtly at Rey, still holding tight to Ben’s left arm.

It comes as something of a surprise to Ben that it takes nothing more than this to make him feel fifteen again, soaking up his father’s attention, a little desperate for his approval, envious of the ease with which he confronts things that would make Ben squirm if the roles were reversed.

“I—” Ben attempts, but immediately falters. He shrugs, “It’s new.”

“I’ll say,” Han chuckles lowly. “I guess I’m just curious—” he trails off, but Ben thinks he’s got a pretty good handle on what his father is actually asking.

“I mean,” he glances down at Rey, unaware of the way his face softens marginally when he does so. “You’ve met her right?”

Han laughs, says, “Yeah, kid, I have,” and Ben thinks that might be all there is to it. That is, until Han asks, “Hey, how did _you_ meet her anyway?”

“In a bar,” Ben tells him, but he’s pretty sure it’s drowned out by the arrival of Rey’s friends—Finn, the petite Asian woman he’d been with earlier, and Poe fucking Dameron. Marvelous.

“Of all the gin joints!” Poe cries as the group approaches. “Benny, it has been much too long!” Poe throws his arms around Ben’s exposed right side, knocking him further into Rey who is much more good-humored about it than Ben, to no one’s surprise. 

“Dameron,” Ben groans, extricating himself. “You know I hate it when people call me Benny.”

“Yes, I do,” Poe laughs maniacally while Leia snaps, “I call you Benny!”

“Yeah, but you’re my mother, so there’s not a lot I can do about that, is there?”

“So long as you know that, little boy,” she crows.

Ben rolls his eyes but doesn’t reply. Instead, he turns his attention to the other two new arrivals and greets them politely. He shakes Finn’s hand again, muttering his name, which Finn copies, as they each grasp the other’s hand a little more firmly than necessary. When they release one another, Ben extends his hand to the woman, unsure if he’s heard Rey say her name this evening and certainly not remembering it if he has.

“I’m Ben,” he says, and when she replies that her name is Rose, “nice to meet you.”

Ben is eager to get the attention off himself, but no such luck comes to him because Han repeats his question, loud enough for the group to hear this time: “So, _how_ did you say you two met?”

Ben and Rey exchange a look as subtly as possible. It’s Rey who answers Han. “We met in a restaurant,” she tells him, wrapping her left hand around Ben’s forearm again.

“Didn’t you just say it was a bar?” Han asks, looking back to Ben.

“If you heard me, then why did you ask again?” Ben huffs.

Rey smooths her hand down his forearm and back up to the crease of his elbow, appearing like a comforting gesture to everyone else (which it is, but Ben’s not about to tell her or anyone else that), but signaling Ben that she’s got it covered.

“He was in the bar, I was in the restaurant,” she answers Han. “I stopped in after work one night to get food to take home, but it was packed so they asked me to wait in the bar. I happened to sit down next to him, and we got chatting—”

Here, Ben interjects to clarify, “ _She_ got chatting.”

Rey smiles up at him, turns back to the group, and goes on, “ _I_ got chatting, and before I left, he got a little bit brave and asked for my number.”

Poe mumbles, “go Benny!” and Leia promptly elbows him, making Rey laugh as she continues regaling the group with this entirely impromptu fiction.

“He had texted me by the time I got home, and we just, sort of, kept talking. We got dinner one night, and then started spending more time together, and it was all very casual at first, which is why I didn’t say anything to you about it, Leia.”

This time it’s Leia who interrupts: “I would ask why you didn’t say anything to me about it, Benny, but I suspect that would be unnecessary, as well as fruitless.”

Ben rolls his eyes, but does take over the storytelling for Rey, “ _Anyway_ , we realized within that first week that we had some…overlap in our lives, but luckily, we were both in agreement that it would be better if we kept things quiet until we decided if it was actually going anywhere with us. And then Rey started talking about the party planning, and when I got the invitation a few weeks ago, we wondered if maybe this would be the best time to do it—you know, get it over with all at once so that hopefully we didn’t have to tell this story half a dozen times and such.”

“Well, truth be told, I’m a little surprised that none of us found out some other way before now, but I suppose it’s easy to keep secrets from your mother when you _almost never call her_ ,” Leia taunts.

Ben blushes and huffs and stammers until Rey puts him out of his misery, tipping her face against his arm and pecking a kiss to his arm.

“How did none of us find out before now?” Han wonders aloud, though mostly to himself.

“Well, I mean…” Finn hedges.

“You knew?” Han and Poe ask simultaneously.

Leia’s eyes drift toward the ceiling impatiently, “He lives with Rey, dummy, of course he knew.”

Han bobs his head in acceptance, but Poe puts on a show of outrage.

“Rey! Why didn’t you tell me? We share an office, ma’am. And I actually know him!”

Rey reasons, “You knew him when you were children, Poe. How many years north of a decade has it been since you’ve seen him, before tonight I mean?”

“But Finn got to know! Why didn’t you tell me?” he whines.

Ben deadpans, “Because you’ve got a big mouth, Dameron. Also, because it’s none of your business.”

Rey does her best to placate them both as the group laughs.

“Believe me, it hasn’t been all it’s cracked up to be,” Finn asserts. “It’s a small apartment, and Rey was loud enough when she was spending her nights on her own, if you know what I mean.” He says it so suggestively, and to the surprise of both Ben and Rey, that they each begin to blush profusely at the implications, Rey glaring the dirtiest look she can muster at him while avoiding eye contact with Leia at all costs.

Shortly, Finn asks Rose to dance and they excuse themselves, Rose calling over her shoulder, “I’m really happy for you two—you’re adorable together!” as Finn leads her away. Luke saunters off to say hello to some of the few guests at the party for him. Han congratulates them, assures Rey that she’s too good for Ben, looks pleasantly surprised when Ben agrees, and then makes a beeline to the bar. Leia gets called away, making them promise that they won’t sneak off without saying goodbye, and then doubling back to make them promise that they’ll let her get a picture of them before the night is out because she’ll need something to put in her new frame, after all. Poe lingers the longest, picking at Ben like he had when they were kids together, stirring up trouble just for the hell of it, and teasing them both about how he could have set them up if Ben had bothered to keep in touch and if Rey weren’t such an effective sneak.

Eventually, they’re left alone. There are no more gift bags to manage, no people left to avoid or confront, no reason for them to remain entwined. Rey releases the hand she had kept on his elbow, backs up a couple of steps, but keeps her fingers tangled with his own.

“Sooo,” she begins, “Drink? Dance? I don’t think they’ll be cutting the cake for a while, so unfortunately we’ll have to wait on that, but I think we’ve earned a bit of a break at least.”

Her smile is flawless, infectious, and Ben just hopes that the one he sends her in return doesn’t look entirely unnatural on his face.

Before he can answer her previous inquiry, Rey’s smile drops off, her lips folding themselves in between her teeth.

“Ben, I just… I wanted to say thank you again, for doing this for me. I really—”

“Hey,” he interrupts, jostling her hand he’s holding and drawing her eyes back up to his own, “I thought we established it was a mutually beneficial arrangement? Win-win-win, remember?”

She laughs lightly, a little breathless, but nods at him. “Well, thank you all the same. I really can’t imagine anyone better to have next to me through all this.”

The expression she’s wearing is a curious one to Ben. He’s not sure what to make of her pink cheeks, her roving eyes, the way she’s chewing on the inside corner of her bottom lip. He wants to ask, wishes more than anything that he could summon up the confident persona he’d first addressed her with in the bar across the street, but in the span of the few hours since that first introduction, something has unsettled him.

Maybe it’s just being here, in a room full of people who know him, or at least pretend to. Maybe it’s being confronted with his parents, with Luke, with Poe fucking Dameron. Maybe it’s the way Rey has been wrapped around his arm and he now feels a little bereft without her there. That last one feels relevant, at least. Something about this woman—this stunning, sweet, intelligent woman who he had merely had the good fortune to happen across—Rey is not just anyone, and even with only a few hours of acquaintance between them, he knows it for sure. Maybe, he thinks, it’s just that he hasn’t had anyone on his arm in ages, and he knows he’s never had anyone as spectacular as Rey there at all. He’s not sure what he’s going to do with himself when the evening ends and he and Rey go their separate ways. Sure, there’s the chance that he’ll cross paths with her again, but knowing that it won’t be _this_ , won’t be her on his arm and his lips on her forehead and his mother looking at him like he’s finally gotten something entirely, completely right for once in his life, well, it makes the potential victory of her presence feel a little hollow.

“Ben?”

Her gentle voice pulls him out of his thoughts, and he does his best to smile down at her. He isn’t at all sure what he’s supposed to be feeling right now, isn’t at all sure what happens when the evening ends, but he figures that—just for now—he can let himself have this. After all, she had asked him to play along; they might as well do what they can to sell it.

Ben extricates his hand from her, not noticing the flicker of disappointment over her features, and stepping close enough to wrap his arm around her back, fingers curling around her opposite hip. Rey lifts her hands to his chest, smoothing over his lapels before settling so the tips of her forefingers are just brushing his covered collarbones. He grins faintly, his unoccupied hand wrapping around the side of her face and neck, his body drifting closer to press his lips against her forehead again.

He mumbles with his lips brushing her hairline, “Whatever you want, sweetheart.”


	6. An Insistent Invitation and [Un]Agressive Negotiations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I actually edited this chapter, y'all! Aren't you proud of me?
> 
> This one chapter is longer than the first five put together, so hopefully it will hold you a while. I'm still writing this as often as I can, and I promise I'll try not to keep you waiting too awfully long. In the meantime, enjoy this monster update, as well as these moodboards made by the beautiful Lane and myself (I actually put some effort into this one! It was either that or do my actual work, so there's a pretty clear winner there).

Leia gets her picture of them after all. In fact, she gets a few. Ben and Rey dancing; Ben and Rey chatting with Rey’s friends; Ben and Rey at the bar together, she on a stool and him leaning into her while they sip their cocktails. She makes them pose for photos with she and Han, she and Luke, she and Han and Luke, and just about every permutation thereof, the photographer she’d hired for the event snapping shot after shot of them all. Judging by how many times he catches sight of the man through the course of the evening, he’s pretty sure the photographer gets even more shots of him and Rey than they realize, both candid and posed.

When Rey begins to join Ben in his complaining about the uninvited photoshoot, they decide it might be time to start extricating themselves from the party altogether, guests having begun to ebb off about an hour before when the oldest among Luke and Leia’s friends had excused themselves.

Ben would be perfectly happy to duck out unceremoniously, to claim later that they hadn’t been able to find Han or Leia in the crowd so that they don’t have to stick around any longer than necessary, but Rey frowns up at him when he suggests it, reminding him that they’d promised to at least say goodbye.

Though, they can’t both help wondering if Ben’s instincts might not have been correct when they approach Leia as she’s chatting with two of her oldest friends who Ben identifies as Maz and Amilyn. When they approach the group, Ben’s hand settles firmly around Rey’s waist and there are greetings exchanged all around, beginning with Maz’s boisterously shouting “Ben Solo!”

“Benny, Rey, good. We were just talking about you two,” Leia informs them as Amilyn sends them both an apologetic look.

“Oh? Why’s that then?” Rey smiles, trying not to give away any sign of the apprehension that Ben thinks they’re both feeling.

“Well, I was telling these two,” Leia gestures to her friends, “about the two of you showing up here tonight and I was saying that it’s kind of a shame that all of this,” she gestures broadly at the room, “prevents me from being able to really, you know, take it all in.”

Ben lifts an eyebrow and _mmhmm_ s, so much like Leia herself that the other three women all share a look of amusement between them.

“Anyway, I had a fantastic idea: we should plan a weekend away for all of us! We’ll get out of the city—you know your uncle has that cabin out in Montauk that he never uses these days—and that way we’ll have time to catch up on everything and—”

Before Leia can finish, Ben is objecting with an alarmed look. “No way,” he says, and when she huffs and asks why the hell not, he tells her, “Because. We’re both busy, and whatever time we have off, we would rather not spend in some remote cabin with my family, thanks.”

“You keep saying ‘we,’ Benny, but you haven’t even asked Rey how she feels about the idea.”

She says it as if Rey isn’t standing right next to him, perfectly capable of inserting her voice into the conversation whenever she’s inclined. Leia’s tone is haughty, and it raises Ben’s hackles an inch or two, so Rey tries to intervene early by saying, “Well, I mean, it’s not that it’s not a nice offer. It is, and I would love to visit Luke’s cabin sometime, but Ben has so much going on at work, and we wouldn’t want to put Luke out or anything, and—”

Ben’s grateful for the attempt, but he knows right away that it won’t be enough to dissuade his mother from this particular resolution of hers.

“Nonsense! Ben shouldn’t be working on the weekends anyway, especially not now that he has you, and Luke won’t mind us using his place, even if he doesn’t come with us.”

“Mom, I—”

“No, Ben.” Her words are suddenly firm. “Your father and I have waited an awfully long time for you to bring someone home with you—I would like for us both to be alive to see our only son settle down and have a family—and then you waltz in here tonight with Rey on your arm—who we already know and love—and you just tell us that you’ve been together for two months like it’s the most mundane thing in the world. That’s just not going to cut it, kiddo. We want to spend some time with the two of you when we can actually _spend some time_ with the two of you. It’s one weekend, Benny, and you and I both know that Rey is not the holdout here, so I am asking you to please, shut up and do this because it will make your aging mother very, very happy.”

Ben looks a little cowed, his eyes softening as he’s reminded of all the pain and trouble and turmoil he has inflicted—intentionally or not—on his mother in the last fifteen or so years. Logically, he knows that she’s not asking too much of him, that if he and Rey were really together, he would likely still grumble about it, but would fold much more readily. He looks to Rey for some help, but she merely shrugs at him and quirks her mouth in a poor imitation of her brilliant smile.

“We’ll see if we can find a weekend soon, Leia,” Rey says evenly, wrapping her arm around Ben’s back and pulling herself tighter into his side. He takes a deep breath, but when both Rey and Leia look up at him, he exhales heavily and nods his concession.

“Next weekend,” Leia states. “We won’t be too busy in the office, and if we put it off, this one,” she throws a thumb toward Ben, “will just keep coming up with reasons why he’s too busy for us to do it.”

Rey looks at Ben whose face tells her everything she needs to know about his feelings on Leia’s claim. “Oh, Leia,” she starts, ready to make as many excuses as she needs to, totally prepared to take the brunt of Leia’s frustration if it means getting them out of the weekend.

“Next weekend,” Leia insists. “Now, why don’t you take him home. He looks like he’s just about partied out.” Without waiting for any kind of reply, Leia leans forward and kisses Rey’s cheek and then Ben’s, Maz and Amilyn also saying their goodbyes. “I’ll tell Luke and Han that you said goodbye, and we’ll see you _next weekend_ ,” she tells Ben, who looks blankly at her rather than respond. “Rey, I’ll see you on Monday?”

Rey nods, says one more goodbye to all the ladies, and slips away from Ben enough to reclaim his hand and tug him away. She leads him outside silently, neither of them stopping to say goodbyes to anyone else as they head for the hotel’s grand lobby. When they’re outside on the sidewalk again, still holding onto one another, Rey pulls him to a halt.

“We don’t have to do this, you know. I’ll tell Leia that something came up, or maybe just that I’m not sure I’m ready for a whole family weekend. We’ll come up with something, okay? I don’t want you to feel like we have to do this.”

Ben grins fondly down at her, bobs his head.

“Maybe we could talk about it? This week sometime?”

Rey looks surprised by the offer, but not at all displeased. “Yes, yes, absolutely, we can do that.”

Ben chuckles and reaches his hand out, palm flat. “Gimme your phone,” he demands, and Rey readily fishes it out of her clutch and unlocks it, passing it to him.

He puts his number in and passes it back, but before she locks the phone, she tugs gently on Ben’s lapel so he’ll bend down a little. She leans into him and lifts the phone in front of them, snapping a selfie that she then attaches to his new contact in her phone.

“Any good?” he asks softly. Rey nods and holds her phone up to show him. “Cute,” he says, “you should send that to me. You know, so I’ll have one to use for your contact too.”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” she says, texting it to him while they stand there together.

“So, which way do you live?” he asks, running a hand through the front of his hair.

“Just over in Chelsea. You?”

“Lenox Hill,” Ben replies. “I could drop you off first, though, if you want to share a cab or whatever.”

“That’s okay. I can manage,” Rey assures him.

“Right,” Ben says, fiddling with his hair again, trying not to be disappointed to be going their separate ways sooner than they absolutely have to. “But you’ll, um, you’ll text me, right? About getting together this week? So we can, you know, strategize or whatever?”

Rey giggles, smiling brightly up at him. “Of course I will,” she rises to her tiptoes and presses a fleeting kiss to his jawline, startling him. She pulls back and drops back to her normal height. “Boyfriend.” With that, Rey winks at him, walks to the curb and whistles loudly for a cab. Ben watches as one immediately stops a few feet ahead of her, she walks up and slides into the backseat, sending him a final smile over her shoulder as she closes the door and the car pulls away.

After a few minutes in a stunned stupor, Ben flags down a cab of his own, giving the address to his townhouse. He spends the ride home thinking about Rey and the strange events that have brought him to this point in his evening. He looks intermittently at the picture she’d sent him. Even without knowing quite what she was doing, photo-Ben still looks like a smitten fool with this beautiful woman standing next to him with that smile on her face.

“Buddy, you gettin’ out here or?” the cabby asks.

Ben nods, pays the man and includes a generous tip, exits the cab, and heads inside. It’s late, well beyond when Ben would normally have called it a day, so he quickly strips out of his suit and showers, spending long minutes under the hot water and very determinedly not letting his thoughts drift in the direction of bare shoulders, bright smiles, soft lips, and slender curves pressed to his side.

He turns the water to tepid, flinching as the cool ripples over his skin, and finishes up quickly. Ben doesn’t bother dressing when he exits the shower, just drying off and slumping between the sheets of his bed. As he drifts off, his apartment feels too quiet, his bed too big, his body too cold. He falls asleep feeling ridiculous in his loneliness and wondering how long it will take him to get back to normal. What is the half-life of an evening spent with an amazing woman you just met?

\--

They spend the next three days exchanging occasional text messages.

It’s Ben who texts first. He wakes up the morning after the party beating himself up for not making sure Rey had made it home safely. For one thing, it seems like it would have been the polite thing for him to do. For another, he’s more than a little frustrated at having missed out on starting a conversation with her while he actually had a perfectly valid reason to do so.

Now, after the fact, he feels like a damn fool as he texts her that morning to say that he hopes she made it home safely and that he’s sorry for not checking in last night. It takes a couple of hours from the time he texts her—far too early, nearly as soon as he had woken up at a little past six—for her to reply, but when she does, it’s with all the good humor she’d possessed the previous evening, and Ben is man enough to acknowledge to himself the little flutter he feels ripple through his chest. It’s not something he really knows how to put a name to, but it’s there all the same, and alone in his apartment at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning, he won’t bother pretending that it isn’t.

They continue texting off and on for the rest of the weekend. It’s nothing of any consequence—Rey gives him a running commentary on brunch with Finn and Rose and Poe, who are all hungover after the party, apparently something they try to do at least once a month. Ben tells Rey about a documentary he’s watching and she doesn’t even make fun of him for knowing enough about the topic that he can identify all the things the film is getting wrong (though she does ask if he’s watching it just so he can feel good about _knowing_ they’re wrong). She tells him about a big project she’s supposed to finish this week and how glad she’ll be to have it off her plate. He tells her about a dog he sees when he goes for a run on Sunday afternoon and how he likes the way the late September leaves are dropping off the trees while others are still green and clinging to the branches.

It’s mindless chatter for the most part, but Rey feels like she’s learning more about Ben from texting him than he likely would have been willing to tell her if she’d just asked. It’s interesting for her as Leia’s pseudo-mentee to get to know the son that Leia had talked so sparingly about, mostly only sharing stories of Ben from his childhood. Ben is somehow nothing like what she imagined and exactly what she expected all at once. Talking to him is, well, _fun_. He has all of Han’s charm, all of Leia’s sarcasm; he’s smart and interesting and sweet and a lot less cocky than he seemed when he started talking to her in the bar on Friday night.

As fake boyfriends go, Rey thinks Ben is basically the best case scenario. In addition to being undeniably handsome, he’s so much nicer than she might have expected. It was a foolish scheme to begin with, Rey knows, but the more she talks to Ben, the less sorry she is that she’d done it. The fact of the matter is that Rey likes spending time with Ben—she’d enjoyed Leia’s birthday party more than any other of the many events she’s attended at Leia’s behest, and she knows Ben is mostly responsible for that. Still, she’s surprised when he texts her Sunday afternoon to say that he thinks they _should_ go to the cabin next weekend.

While she’s not exactly looking forward to spending a weekend lying to people she loves like family, Rey is a little excited at the prospect of having a reason to hang out with Ben again, for an entire weekend no less.

Sunday night, Ben sends a message to ask what she usually does for lunch. It seems like a weird question, but she answers him anyway. Usually, Rey stays in the office for lunch and has whatever she brought from home, or more often still, she just eats a handful of whatever snack she has in her desk drawer at the time. Occasionally she’ll have lunch out if there’s a group going, but for the most part, she only dines out when client meetings call for her to do so.

It makes more sense to her, however, when Ben replies to ask if she would like to have lunch with him one afternoon this week. Rey has no way of knowing that on the other end of the conversation, Ben has fretted and panicked and talked himself out of asking her out for dinner, thinking that it might make her more comfortable if they were to meet under more casual circumstances.

Not knowing this, Rey doesn’t think much of the invitation, though she does readily accept him. They agree to meet on Tuesday at 1:00. Rey sends Ben the address for a place he’s never even heard of called Ersandor. When he looks up the menu—because somehow, he gets the feeling that he might be nervous enough when he sees her again without any of the added awkwardness of unfamiliarity—he finds that it’s a local bistro opened a few years back by a married couple who met after they both immigrated to the US. With her British roots and his Mexican heritage, it makes sense, Ben thinks, that the menu seems to be an eclectic selection that seems mainly to consist of a few standard dishes and whatever the couple feel like making that day. Ben wonders why Rey had chosen this place, not because he wasn’t curious to try it, but merely because he just wants to know, wants to collect and retain as much information about the girl who had unexpected changed the trajectory of his life, at least for the time being.

Rey asks, when Ben texts her good morning on Monday, if he’s sure he’s cool with coming to her part of town, and he assures her that he is. She asks if he’s sure he’s okay with the restaurant she picked, and he tells her he’s eager to try it. Rey asks why he wants to meet for lunch anyway, and he cryptically replies that he thinks they should talk some things over. She’s out of good questions to ask him, so she asks instead, meaning it to make him laugh, if he misses her. Ben takes several minutes to reply to that one, during which time Rey watches the three dots that indicate he’s typing flicker on the screen and disappear repeatedly. When she finally does get a reply, it very candidly says, “Strangely, yes.”

Rey maybe thinks about it for the rest of the day, but it doesn’t prevent her from getting her actual work done, so she doesn’t worry too much about it. And if she spends her entire afternoon half-thinking about what she might wear the next day, well, nobody needs to know.

\--

When Rey first went to Ersandor, it was because she and Finn had stumbled in to avoid an unannounced rainstorm that hit when they were walking home from the office one evening. They decided that since they were there, the polite thing to do would be to actually patronize the restaurant they were loitering in. They didn’t know anything about the place, but they figured they had both definitely eaten worse meals, no matter what it turned out to be like, and it looked nice enough. They were both recent hires at Resistance and it still felt like a big deal to be able to go out for a meal without worrying about overdrawing their bank accounts.

It turned out to be the best thing either of them had eaten in ages, and they fell in love with the atmosphere and the staff of the restaurant. It was small enough that the owners, Jyn Erso and her husband, Cassian Andor, popped in and out of the kitchen regularly. When Cassian stopped by their table to ask how their meal was, Rey couldn’t stop raving about it. He wound up sitting with them until Jyn came looking for him, running him off back into the kitchen while she took over his seat and they got to know her.

Since then, Rey has become something of a regular, visiting the place as often as she can find an occasion to. Taking Ben there seems as good a reason as any; that, and she might be a little curious to see how he handles Cassian and Jyn. She’d taken a date there only once before. He had complained about the constant ruckus all throughout the meal, and when Cassian had stopped by the table to say hello to Rey, he had accused Rey of flirting with Cassian while she was already on a date—and he hadn’t even bothered to wait until Cassian had left the table. From then on, she decided she would only take romantic partners in to meet them if things were serious between them. But she isn’t really dating Ben, she reasons, so it doesn’t count. Besides, she’s certain that he will at least be better behaved.

\--

Ben gets to the restaurant twenty minutes early. He spends the first ten of those dithering on the sidewalk before he gets chilly in the afternoon breeze. When he goes inside, he asks for a table for two, and sits sipping a glass of water, eyes occasionally flicking over to check the time on his phone while he waits.

A dark haired man several inches shorter than Ben comes by the table with an order pad. “Somebody stand you up?” he asks with a small smile.

“Oh, uh, no, she’s, uh. I got here a little early.”

“Well I’m sure she’ll be here soon. I assume you want to wait for her to order?”

Ben nods, expecting that to bring the conversation to a natural stopping point. He’s a little surprised to see the man pull out the chair across from him and take a seat.

“You look like you could use a distraction,” he tells him. The man drops his order pad onto the table and stretching his hand across to shake Ben’s. “I’m Cassian,” he says jovially, “Cassian Andor.”

“Ben Solo.”

“Nice to meet you, Ben! This is your first time here, right? I’m good with faces and you don’t look familiar, so…”

“Yeah, first time,” Ben tells him. “My, uh—” he hesitates, battling with himself about what to call her. For the sake of simplicity, or so he tells himself, he settles on, “My girlfriend works nearby. She’s who I’m waiting on.”

“Cool, cool. Well, my wife is cooking today, so you’re in for a treat. Don’t tell her I said that.”

“Your wife works here too then?”

“Yeah, Jyn.” He points to the back of the restaurant where there’s a large opening into the kitchen through which a slender brunette is visible, flitting around and barking gleefully at the rest of the kitchen staff who seem to be laughing and joking right back.

Cassian tells Ben about how he and Jyn had met and how they had arrived at the decision to open a restaurant. He gives him recommendations about the menu and asks about Ben’s job and he’s just starting in on asking about Ben’s girlfriend when Rey walks in.

Ben sees her right away, a little frazzled but stunning nonetheless. She’s wearing a structured sweater in a pale gray with thick stripes running around the sleeves and the collar, two buttons fastened just over the dip where her clavicles meet, sleek pants that show off her tiny waist and her rounded hips, and a pair of relatively low heels. Ben doesn’t know exactly what his face does, but it must give something away because right away, Cassian turns in his chair to look at the newcomer, already asking, “She here?”

It’s unexpected for Ben, though, when Cassian jumps up out of his seat with a shout and rushes to close the distance between himself and Rey. She looks delighted but unsurprised to see him, throwing her arms around his shoulders as he hugs her and lifts her off her feet. When he puts her down, they’re both laughing, and Cassian immediately turns to yell to Jyn in the kitchen that their favorite customer has come to visit them.

Rey’s cheeks pinken under the attention, but she waves and calls a hello the Jyn as she moves toward the table where Ben is now standing.

“Hey there,” she says, the full force of her smile blinding as it settles on him.

Cassian follows her back over to the table, tugging the chair out for her before Ben can move to do it himself. She sits and Ben follows, Cassian standing beside the table looking between them.

“Why didn’t you come tell us you had found a nice man, chica?”

“I guess you’ve already met Ben then,” she giggles.

Cassian bobs his head, smiles easily over at Ben as he tells Rey, “He needed distracting.”

“Is that right?” Rey asks with a smirk as she cocks an eyebrow at Ben across the table.

Ben shrugs back, mutters, “Maybe.”

“Well, don’t bother ordering. I’ll take care of it. Ben, are you picky? Any allergies or anything?”

Ben shakes his head no, looking a little confused, but generally unbothered.

“Good then. Rey, I’ll bring you something to drink too. You want anything else, just yell.” He leaves the two of them sitting at the table and heads off in the direction of the kitchen, shouting that his wife should come and meet Rey’s boyfriend.

“Sorry about him,” Rey apologizes just as Ben is saying, “They really know you, huh?”

They laugh at themselves until Rey breaks the moment. “I’ve been coming here for a few years now. They’re pretty much always like that. I hope this place is okay with you though?”

“Oh yeah, it’s great,” Ben assures her. “Truth be told, I was glad to not have to choose. I’m not very decisive about small things like this. Business decisions are one thing, but picking something to eat or watch or whatever, I’m pretty much useless.”

Rey chuckles and rolls her eyes. “I can’t quite imagine you being ‘useless,’ but I’ll take your word for it. I’m totally the opposite. Well, I mean, I guess big decisions don’t really bother me too much either, but probably only because there haven’t been that many of them in my life. If I had to deal with things like that all the time, for my job or whatever, like you do, I’m sure I’d grow to hate them.”

“You get used to it, I guess. Or I did at least.” He shrugs. “Is this place your favorite then?”

“One of. I’m not really picky about food.”

“But you’re picky about other things?” he asks.

“I guess, yeah,” she shrugs. “Growing up like I did, I guess it made me really particular about some things and really unbothered by others.”

“Like what?”

“Liiiike…I’ll eat anything and probably enjoy most of it, and I don’t really care too much about clothes and things—like that dress I wore to the party wasn’t even mine because I don’t own anything that nice. With clothes and food and stuff, I mostly had to buy them for myself which kind of took the magic out of. I just learned really early on that having something was better than nothing, even if the something wasn’t what I wanted. I learned to make do with things because there was no way to change it. At the same time though, I’m really fastidious about where I live and the people I have in my life and stuff. I didn’t have much choice about those things as a kid, and as an adult, I feel like I finally have the power to control them, so I’m much more deliberate about them. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but—”

“It does,” Ben interjects. “To me, it— _you_ make sense to me.”

Rey smiles softly down at the table, unwilling to look up at Ben. She surreptitiously fights off a blush, brushes her fingertips over both her cheeks in turn. He doesn’t call her on it, pretending not to notice.

Cassian brings their food—an array of colorful dishes of vegetables and meat and sauces and breads. They eat quietly for a minute, and then Ben takes a sip of water and looks over the table at her. "So, you said ‘growing up like I did.’ I don’t want to pry, and you definitely don’t have to tell me anything you’re not comfortable with, but…what did you mean by that?”

Rey sighs, her fork hesitating in the air as she rolls her lips together and stares into Ben’s eyes. She goes back to eating, and Ben thinks that’s her way of indicating that it’s a conversation she’s not ready to have. He’s just begun to follow suit, turning his attention back to his own plate when her quiet voice stops him.

“Well, I’m English, obviously, but really, that’s sort of all I know about my parents. They brought me to America when I was really little, around four or five, and they left me with a man named Unkar Plutt. He used to tell me that they sold me to him, and for all I know, they did. He was full of shit, but I have no way of knowing— Anyway. Officially, he was listed on all of my paperwork for school and stuff as my uncle, and whenever anyone asked, he told them he’d taken me in when my parents decided that having me had been a mistake. He always acted like he’d done me some big favor or something.”

Ben’s jaw is clenching, his fingers going white-knuckled around the handle of his fork. He won’t interrupt her, won’t tell her he’s sorry or that she didn’t deserve that. The woman in front of him is even stronger than he’d realized before, and something tells him that she doesn’t need him to tell her what she already knows—that she’s so very much more than her past.

“Anyway, he wasn’t exactly a loving guardian, but he pretty much left me alone. He wasn’t violent or anything at least, though I think that’s less to do with him and more just that I never gave him a reason to be. Especially as I got older, I tried to just keep to myself. As long as I did whatever he asked of me—chores and errands and stuff—he more or less let me take care of myself, which was probably better than the alternative.”

She takes a large bite, chews quickly, and swallows a large mouthful of water.

“At any rate, I think being a kid and being mostly left to my own devices really fixed it in my mind that some things just aren’t worth worrying over.”

“You’re incredible.” It’s the first time Ben has spoken in a while, and judging by the look on her face, it is not the response Rey had been expecting. Before she can object, which he suspects she’s well on her way to doing, he goes on. “Seriously, Rey, I mean it: you are _incredible_. What kid grows up on their own like that and still comes out this well-adjusted? You’re just… _astonishing_.”

“I don’t know about all that,” she hedges. Rey lifts her eyes back to his. “But thank you, Ben.”

They spend the rest of the meal covering lighter topics, starting with how amazing their food is and transitioning into discussions of favorite foods, movies, things to do. They tell each other about their friends, including a full explanation of Ben’s childhood with Poe and a particularly nasty grounding they had each received at age eleven for one of the many shenanigans Poe had involved him in.

Over the dessert that Cassian insists they have, Rey decides they should cover some of the boyfriend-girlfriend basics that might come up during the course of the weekend. Ben isn’t even sure what those “basics” might be, given that his last real relationship had been just after college and “relationship” was really a generous term for the dynamic which had mostly consisted of Ben dropping cash to take her places she wanted to go, mediocre sex, and waking up alone. When he tells her as much, Rey teases him, “God, have you never seen a movie?”

They cover a lot of ground—at what age they had each started dating, first kisses, losing their virginity, best date, worst date, etc. They come up with a story of what their first pretend date had been like—a nice dinner and a walk through Central Park—and spend some time establishing other elements of backstory. By the time they’re wrapping up, they have determined that they actually sleep on opposite sides of the bed (“Convenient,” Rey had said, and it had taken a full fifteen minutes for Ben to realize that she was referring to the fact that they’d apparently be sharing a bed that weekend. He only freaked out a little, thank you very much), that neither of them are particularly bothered by things like pet names or public displays of affection as long as they feel natural, that Ben is definitely the better cook of the two of them, and that they are at the stage of their fictious relationship where they sleep over and have toothbrushes and stuff at each other’s places, but are still a good ways off from talking about moving in together.

Ben could easily spend the rest of the afternoon bantering back and forth with Rey, or doing nearly anything else with her really, as long as she keeps smiling at him. Jyn does find a moment to sneak out of the kitchen, and Ben is only a little envious of the ease Rey demonstrates at being social. He is slightly more surprised by the ease she exhibits in reaching over the table and catching his hand as she gives Jyn a condensed version of the backstory they’d concocted before the party. Jyn is sweet, her accent not quite as cute as Rey’s (he’s maybe a little biased), but it feels significant when she leaves the table with a wink at him, whispering something to Rey when they hug that has her rolling her eyes and laughing joyfully.

Ben insists on paying for lunch, though when Rey fixes him with a stare and unilaterally informs him that their relationship—fake or not—will never be one where she expects him to pay for every date and put up a fight when she tries to pay for anything, he promises she can pick up the next one. Ben doesn’t let himself think about the fact that she hasn’t objected to the implication of a future date, and he definitely doesn’t let himself think about whether her silence means she’s fine with it or just that she knows this will likely all be over before it becomes an issue.

Ben offers to walk her back to her office—“like any decent boyfriend would”—and Rey lets him, if only because it means getting to hang out with him for a few extra minutes. She wraps her arm around his lower back, teasing him that he needs to get used to her touching him before they spend the weekend putting on a show for his family.

He returns the gesture, tugging her just a little closer to his side, and smirks, speaking without looking at her, “I’m sure I’ll suffer through somehow.”

\--

They’re laughing together at the story Rey is telling him about meeting Jyn and Cassian for the first time when they approach the building that houses Resistance. Between that and the habit shared by most city-dwellers of ignoring the people around them, neither of them sees the familiar face standing just outside the front door.

In fact, it’s not until they hear, “Ben? Rey?” that either of them take notice of Leia’s presence.

Rey reacts first, whipping her head in that direction and pulling Ben to a halt with her. “Leia! Hi!”

“I see you got him out of the office for lunch; good for you,” Leia grins. She turns to her son, smirking up at him, “Twice in one week, Benny. Whatever did I do to deserve such good luck?”

Ben rolls his eyes but leans down and pecks a kiss to Leia’s cheek—without turning Rey loose, of course.

“I guess you’re celebrating that you don’t have to sneak around anymore. Wait, have you _been_ sneaking around? Because honestly, you’re both better at it than I thought.”

“No, Leia,” Rey drawls dramatically, “we’ve not been sneaking around. Not for lunch dates anyway.” She winks up at Ben, and he is far too old to be blushing like he is because a pretty girl is flirting with him, and yet…

“Hey, I was fully prepared to give you credit for it!” Leia crows. “Might have even been a little bit impressed.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Ben grumbles. “I don’t usually leave the office for lunch. I don’t even usually have lunch.”

Rey is a fantastic actor, immediately rolling her eyes and sighing like any longsuffering girlfriend would do. “And you know _I’m_ not skipping lunch,” she jokes with Leia.

“How’d you convince him to join you today? Or do I not want to know?”

Rey laughs goodhumoredly even as Ben releases a slightly shrill and scandalized, “Mom!”

Rey’s face shifts into something more smug than Ben thinks he’s seen on her so far. “Believe it or not, it was his idea.”

Leia does look a little surprised at this, but there’s something pleased creeping in around the edges. “Is that right?” she says, rather than asks. “Well food is definitely the way to this girl’s heart. Keep up the good work, Romeo.” Leia pats Ben’s arm, laughing with Rey as he huffs above them both. “Well, I have a lunch of my own to get to—I’m meeting those two young ladies who came in last week.”

“Oh yes, I remember them. That’s great! I’m glad they decided to go ahead with it.”

“Me too,” Leia replies, “but I probably shouldn’t keep them waiting. Rey, I’ll be back by three, I think, and Ben, I will see you Friday.”

Leia steps away from them without waiting for a response. She moves quickly to the curb where a sleek black towncar is already waiting.

Rey turns her focus back to Ben, lifting the hand not already wrapped around him to rest lightly against his waist. He follows suit, shifting around until he can link his hands at the small of Rey’s back. She’s so petite in his arms. Something about the abundance of her personality is deceptive, making her seem always larger than the woman in his grasp now. Rey’s at the high end of average height, he would guess, but she’s still just the right height so that Ben could tuck her snuggly under his chin. It’s sort of overwhelming, the sudden surety of realizing he wants to.

“So,” Rey begins, smiling easily up at him, “we’ll talk more? Before the weekend, I mean?”

“You’ve got my number.”

Rey nods, eyes leveled at his shoulders rather than his face. She doesn’t speak for a long moment, and Ben doesn’t dare. “Thank you for doing this, Ben. I’m sure it isn’t easy to lie to your family like this, even if it supposedly benefits you.”

“It does benefit me,” Ben insists.

“Oh yeah?” Rey releases a sigh that sounds at least half disbelieving. “How so?”

Ben doesn’t feel like there’s a good answer for the question, despite the myriad ways he could answer it. He could laugh it off; he could remind her of all the reasons he’d given the other night; he could say something too emotional, too honest. None of them feel like good options, but only one of them feels safe.

“Well, you got me out of the office and gave me a reason to eat lunch for once, so there’s that.”

It makes Rey laugh softly, tipping her forehead against his covered collarbone for a few seconds. “That I did.”

“I’m glad,” Ben tells her. “Although, you did tell Leia that it was my idea, so technically, I guess I got _you_ out of the office and gave _you_ a reason to eat lunch.”

“As if I needed a reason. Your mother was right you know—food is definitely the way to my heart.”

“Noted,” Ben chuckles.

They stand there on the sidewalk in front of Rey’s office. Neither of them is holding on tightly enough that they couldn’t easily extricate themselves from the other, but neither of them moves to do so. Not until someone complains about having to step around them anyway.

It makes Rey giggle, which she stifles against his chest.

“I guess that’s my cue. I should get back to work anyway.”

Rey nods, smiling softly. She draws back minutely before ducking forward and rocking onto her tiptoes to brush her lips fleetingly against his cheek and the corner of his mouth.

“I’ll talk to you later then?” she asks as she draws back, taking a step away from him and adjusting her purse strap.

Ben runs a hand through his hair. “You will,” he promises.

She nods once more, smiling as she turns away from him and heads into the building, glancing back and throwing a little wave over her shoulder as she steps inside and out of view. Ben waits until she’s gone to move, turning to hail a cab. He’s been out of the office longer than he meant to be, and he’s sure that he’ll have about a million emails waiting on him since he usually uses his lunch hour to reply to as many as he can. It’s a small price to pay for the lingering tingle Rey’s lips had left on his face.

\--

On Wednesday night, Ben makes it home slightly earlier than he normally would. He rewards himself by cooking an actual meal—nothing fancy, but certainly a step up from takeout, leftovers, or late night cereal. He’s just finished eating, standing in the kitchen rinsing the plate he used before he loads it into the dishwasher, when his phone starts buzzing on the granite countertop, the corner colliding with the half-empty bottle of beer he’d left in front of the seat he’d just vacated.

He doesn’t really think anything of the call, merely reaches over to grab it and presses the green button on the screen to accept it.

“Ben Solo,” he says, still not paying much attention.

“Is that always how you answer the phone? Don’t you think if someone is calling you that they know they’re calling, you know, _you_?”

Her voice is all teasing and brightness, and Ben finds himself smiling without really meaning to.

“I suppose, but then again, saying my name is an excellent way for them to know whether or not they’ve actually reached the person they wanted to speak to. What if they dialed the wrong number?”

“Oh please” —he can just about see her rolling her eyes on the other end of the line— “the only people who dial numbers anymore are telemarketers and doctor’s offices. Everyone else has the number saved in their phone already.”

“Well, what if they accidentally hit the wrong person in their contacts then?”

It’s easy, this banter between them, and it’s quickly becoming the best part of his already above average day.

“It could happen, I guess. But even that’s unlikely because, let’s face it, who really calls anyone anymore?”

“She says to the person she _just_ _called_.”

“Well, yes, but I’m a maverick.”

“Oh, well, obviously, a maverick, sure,” Ben taunts. The width of his smile feels a little foreign stretching across his face, but in the most pleasant way possible. In fact, that’s a pretty apt explanation of how having Rey in his life feels all around.

“Oh, hush, you! Can’t a woman call her fake-boyfriend anymore without such torment?”

“I’ll allow it,” Ben concedes. “So, have you just missed me so much since yesterday that you couldn’t bear to go without me, or are you calling for a specific reason?”

“Two things can be true, _Benny_ ,” Rey quips, placing added emphasis on the nickname his mother always uses for him.

It doesn’t quite add up, the way that Ben is so much more at ease with Rey, who he has known for the sum total of less than one week, than he is with, well, pretty much anyone else. It’s a positive thing, he reasons, that he feels so comfortable with her. It’s good that he feels so comfortable with anyone, probably, since his social life has been lackluster at best for the better part of his adult life if he’s being honest. He doesn’t understand it, or maybe just doesn’t want to try to understand it, but there’s an impulse in him that only she brings out. He _wants_ to talk to her, wants to tease her and make her laugh and let her poke fun at him for all the things that he would get completely defensive about if it were anyone else in the world calling them out.

There’s an implicit sort of acceptance between the pair of them, and maybe that’s just what happens when you start a relationship with someone by setting yourselves up to fight back to back, so to speak, knowing that the normal risk of destruction is now necessarily mutually assured, and yet trusting each other to do as much as possible to prevent it, to have your back just as they’re trusting you to have theirs.

He realizes he’s been quiet for a moment more than is comfortable when you’re on the phone with someone and they can’t see the wistful, goofy grin you’re surprisingly unbothered about wearing. He’s about to try to rectify that when Rey picks up the conversation herself, seemingly unbothered by his distracted silence.

“Actually, that’s sort of why I called.”

“To test out my mother’s nickname for me? Because I’ve gotta say, there are almost definitely better options out there, if you’re looking for a pet name.”

“You really are impossible, you know that?”

“So I’ve been told,” he quips. “But please, continue.”

“Well, your mum said something this afternoon about you not having visited Luke’s cabin in quite a while. She didn’t say much more, but I got the impression… That is, it made me realize that I don’t really know much about _your_ history. I mean, I gave you my whole backstory at lunch yesterday, but I’m afraid I didn’t give you much of a chance to do the same.”

It’s not at all what Ben had been expecting from the way their conversation had started, and he’s sure his voice gives away how caught off guard he feels.

“Oh, uh—well, I, um, I’ll tell you whatever you’d like to know, I guess, though I can’t say it’s a particularly pleasant story.”

“And mine is?” Rey shoots back, something sharp and defensive curling around the edges of her voice. He’s reminded suddenly of that first night at the bar when he had dared to imply that Rey didn’t know his family, even though that wasn’t what he’d meant at all when he said it.

“No, Rey, you know that’s not what I meant.”

She sighs, muttering quickly, “No, I know. I know it isn’t. I’m sorry, Ben, I just get—”

“I understand,” he reassures her. “It’s okay, sweetheart, don’t worry about it.” They sit in silence for a moment, and then Ben asks her, “So, what do you want to know?”

“What do you want me to know, Ben?”

The instinctual answer to that question is “as little as possible,” but he doesn’t say that. He’s pretty sure the hesitance he’s exhibiting is more than making that statement for him.

“Ben, you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. I won’t push, I promise. I just thought it would be good for us to talk about it a bit before the weekend, but honestly, the last thing I want to do is make you tell me something you don’t want me to know.

“It’s fine, Rey, really. I trust you. And you’re right—it makes sense for us to talk about it. I mean, you’re my girlfriend, you should—I should—”

“Ben,” Rey says, her voice breathy and measured. “Breathe. Take your time, love.”

His heart leaps in his chest as soon as she says it, so much so that he doesn’t even notice his own slip of the tongue. The weight of the word, along with the comfort her patience offers him, is enough to pull him back from his frazzled rambling. He takes a couple of deep breaths, and Rey just…waits.

“I guess…I mean, I already told you about the job stuff, being in California and all that. Before that, I guess my childhood was pretty average. Mom and dad stayed busy, as much as they could, I think, so I didn’t spend as much time with them as I’d have liked to as a kid. Han tried to be around, but something always came up, you know? And I was…sort of weird, I guess, as little boys go. I get the impression that my father has always been a little rambunctious, and I think he thought I would be the same way, just because I’m his son, but I wasn’t really like that at all. I was a pretty self-sufficient kid, didn’t need a lot of entertaining or whatever.

“We were never as close as we probably should have been, but they did their best, you know? They both had stuff going on, things that made them happy. But as a kid, it just felt like they were choosing to do things that meant they had to be away from me.”

“Oh Ben,” Rey whispers, and he’s not even sure he was supposed to hear it, so he goes on without acknowledgement.

“I spent a lot of time with Luke as a teenager, since he wasn’t really all that interested in taking an active role in Resistance. It was nice, feeling like there was still somebody there. But as far as Luke is concerned, Han and Leia are pretty much untouchable. I was getting into my teen years, started getting into trouble—nothing serious, I mean, just stupid teenage things. Fistfights, skipping school, stuff like that. I think I mostly just wanted their attention. I tried a few times to talk to Luke about it, but every time I said anything about my parents that he didn’t want to hear, he just shut down—he shut me down. So, I stopped talking to him, and then I just kind of stopped talking to anyone. I kept my head down, finished high school. Because they always had other stuff going on, and because I wasn’t all that inclined to open up, I guess it was a big surprise to all of them to learn that I had only applied to schools outside of New York.”

Rey listens attentively, careful not to break her silence, unwilling to do anything that might cause him to second guess himself or feel uncomfortable. At least, more uncomfortable than this sort of thing always is. Rey herself is pretty selective about who she gives her full history to, so she feels like she can understand some of what Ben is feeling at this moment.

“They were pretty pissed, to be honest. But I moved to California anyway, aaaand you’ve already heard that part of the story,” he laughs self-deprecatingly. “It wasn’t until after I was gone, when they realized I didn’t want to come home for holidays and whatever, that my parents took notice of how little they were in my life. Like, I was finally old enough to be interesting to them, and that’s what made them notice that they didn’t actually know much about me. It felt like they only wanted to be in my life on their terms, and by that point, I was so angry at them and hurt that they hadn’t seemed to care before that I just sort of shut them out. I kept in touch with Leia, mostly just emails and stuff, and dad would call occasionally, but I wasn’t really speaking to Luke anymore. They all came to California once, when I finished undergrad, and during the course of the week they were there, I told them I was planning to stay there for work. Mom and dad really tried to be supportive, but Luke and I got into a huge fight about it and I wound up punching him in the face.

“Obviously, we weren’t close after that, and it made things a lot tougher with my parents too. I would hear from them every now and then, but they stopped asking me to come home, and eventually, I stopped hoping to feel like they really wanted me there. I had been back in town for a few months by the time Han checked in, and realizing that I had come home and not bothered to tell them pissed him and mom off, but I think they were mostly just glad I was back. We’ve all been…trying, to sort things out, you know, but when I got the invitation to Leia’s birthday party—well, I think I told you already that I didn’t think she really wanted me there. But, uh, she did, apparently, aaaand now we’re spending the weekend with the three of them at a cabin in the woods. Oh god, why did we agree to this?”

It makes Rey laugh suddenly, the shift in his tone and mood dramatic and abrupt. Rey suspects he’s eager to change the subject. She’s not entirely ready to let it go though. “Thank you for telling me all of that,” she says quietly. “I know it’s not easy to put everything out there, and I really appreciate you trusting me, Ben.”

“You don’t need to thank me for that, Rey. I mean, you were a lot braver about it than I was. You were so… so forthcoming. And god, what you went through. I shouldn’t even be complaining about my own shit, I—”

“Don’t do that, Ben. It’s not a competition. My life has been fucked up in different ways than yours, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t feel the way you do about your past. My baggage doesn’t invalidate yours, Ben. It’s not better or worse or anything—it just is what it is.”

“You really are too good for me; you know that, right?”

She laughs again, and something in Ben’s chest lightens at the sound. “That is definitely not true, but it was sweet of you to say.”

“I mean it. Before the weekend is out, I’m sure my mother will be telling you to dump me and let her set you up with one of her ‘nice young men.’”

“Oh, whatever!” she crows. “You’re so full of shit.” The words hold no conviction, and Rey is relieved that Ben can’t see the heat she can feel rising in her cheeks.

“I mean it! Han will be asking probing questions about how I convinced you to go out with me in the first place, and Leia is going to be making a list of guys she can set you up with when I inevitably fuck it up.”

“You are ridiculous, Ben Solo, has anyone ever told you that before?”

“Not recently.”

“You’re a really good boyfriend, too, even if this is fake.”

Ben is contemplating following that line of conversation. Really, he wants to ask Rey if this all still feels fake to her. When he thinks about it—which he unsuccessfully tries not to—there’s been a very real attraction since the first moment she walked into the bar last Friday night, at least on his part. Ben thinks that maybe there’s something there on Rey’s end as well, though he’s not anywhere near brave enough to speculate about what exactly.

He might just be brave enough to bring it up though, to see how she responds so that at least he would know where he stands. He’s just about to do it when there’s a small ruckus on the other end of the line and Rey huffs, grumbles something about sorry to run, Finn needing help, and talking to him later, and then she’s gone. He spends the rest of the night reminding himself that he doesn’t believe in signs, that the universe is too big to be that interested in him and his love life. It only sort of works.

\--

It just so happens that Ben is already home when his phone rings on Thursday night too. This time, it makes a little more sense though, given that it’s after ten o’clock at night. Nobody calls him this late normally, so he’s a little apprehensive when he lifts his phone to look at the screen.

The nerves dissipate almost instantaneously when he sees Rey’s name and the selfie she had taken of them after the party waiting for him. A different kind of anxiety twists in his chest, a kind he remembers from when he was kid and had a crush on a girl at school. It’s not pleasant, per se, but Ben is not unhappy to feel it there, if only because he knows it is the direct result of some sort of proximity to Rey.

“Hello?” he answers, his tone surprisingly playful.

“Ben!” she cries, and it’s almost enough to resurrect the apprehension of a few moments ago. “I need your help!”

“Rey, are you okay? What’s wrong? Are you alright?”

He wants to ask her where she is, wants to be the kind of lovesick fool who is already out the door with his keys in his hand before she even has the chance to ask him to come to her, but that’s not what they are—that’s not what he is to her. Instead, he lifts his thigh and sits on the hand not holding the phone and tries to quiet his breathing which feels too loud in his empty apartment.

“I’m okay, I mean I’m safe, don’t worry. But I do need your help.”

“Okay? What do you need?”

“Well, I’m trying to pack for this weekend, but I’ve never been to a cabin, and I’ve never spent a weekend with the family of someone I’m dating, so I have no idea what to wear.”

Ben is stunned, and his voice gives him away. “You need me to help you pick your clothes?”

“If that’s okay?”

“Jesus, Rey, I thought something was wrong! You scared the shit out of me!”

“I told you I was safe!”

“Yeah, but ‘don’t worry, I’m safe’ is the kind of thing you say when you have to call your mom and tell her you’re in the hospital with a broken arm or when someone is holding you hostage and they’re about to demand a ransom!”

“Ben, I don’t think anyone who is being held hostage would be telling the person on the other end of the phone that they’re safe. Unless maybe they were in on it.”

She says it so matter-of-factly that Ben can’t help but laugh, the noise building in his chest until it’s spilling out of him and getting louder as it goes. He hears Rey start to giggle on the other end of the line, and then it takes a good few minutes for them to get themselves together enough to stop.

Eventually they manage it, though, and Ben says, “Okay, so you need help packing. Isn’t this the kind of thing that girls usually ask each other?”

“Well, yes, but most of my friends are guys. Rose and her sister Paige are really the only girls I know well enough to ask, and I talked to Rose a little about it today at work, but neither of them answered when I called just now, so.” Ben can’t see her, but he has no trouble visualizing her shrugging as if she’s proved her point and doesn’t understand his continued confusion. It’s cute even if it just in his head.

“Okay, well…how can I help, I guess?”

Rey sighs, like she’s bracing herself for the oncoming conversation. “Well, your mother mentioned earlier that it tends to be a bit colder there since it’s closer to the water, but how much colder? And I know it’s a cabin, but it’s Luke we’re talking about, so is it a cabin like ‘rustic-roughing it-chop firewood-kill your dinner’ kind of cabin, or like a ‘rich people-six bedroom-farmhouse chic-there’s a Whole Foods five minutes away’ kind of cabin?”

It makes Ben laugh again, though thankfully quieter this time. “Ummm somewhere in the middle of those two things I would say? No one is going to ask you to field dress a deer or anything, but it is sort of out of the way in the woods. Like, there is some chopping of firewood, but you won’t have to do it. Does that help?”

Instantly, there’s a vivid image of a shirtless Ben wielding an ax in Rey’s head. It’s definitely not unappealing, come to think of it. She’s got her suspicions that he might be slightly ripped under those expensive suits of his.

She shakes herself out of the daydream before she says something stupid that will doubtless make Ben stammer and blush (also not unappealing if she’s honest), and asks, “And the temperature thing?”

“It’s pretty cool by this point in the year. The woods are kind of dense, so there’s not as much sun, and the chill off the water can be pretty harsh. It also tends to be kind of rainy this time of year, so I would definitely advise boots and a decent jacket, probably one with a hood.”

“Okay, that’s helpful. So like sweaters, jeans, boots—that kind of thing?”

He nods out of habit. “Yeah. Yeah, those are probably all safe bets. It’s too cold to go in the water now, so you don’t need to worry about any of that kind of stuff. Just, uh, whatever you’ll be comfortable in. It’s been a long time since I’ve been there, but when we used to go every year, we mostly just hung out. There are some decent restaurants in town about twenty minutes from the cabin, some shops and stuff too that I’m sure mom will want to take you to. I always liked to go hiking up there.”

“Oh yeah?” Rey interrupts. “I haven’t been hiking in ages, but I used to love to go whenever I could get out of the city when I was in college. Do you think we could go this weekend?”

“If you want, yeah, absolutely,” Ben replies, smiling faintly at her enthusiasm.

“Ok, so, jeans, sweaters, hiking boots, regular boots, jacket…” she trails off and Ben thinks she’s probably writing the items down. “Pajamas!” Rey shouts, and Ben can’t quite stifle the groan that slips out of him at the thought of Rey’s body next to his own between the sheets, but he does thankfully manage to mostly muffle it.

He hasn’t allowed himself to give much thought to the fact that they’ll be sharing a room for the weekend. They had agreed that it would be weirder if they didn’t, because Rey knows as well as he does that his family would expect nothing less. It had seemed like a foregone conclusion to him before, but now he’s twenty-four hours away from the real thing, sitting alone on his overstuffed couch, and his mind is awash with different possibilities of what Rey might choose to sleep in, each one of them more appealing than the last. Honestly, it doesn’t even matter what she chooses to bring with her—the very notion of sleeping next to her is nearly giving him a heart attack, and he’s pretty sure any sort of visual that goes with it is going to do him in entirely. There are worse ways to go than in bed next to a beautiful woman, he supposes.

“Is there anything else I should bring?” Rey asks, bringing him back to the moment.

“Uh, no,” Ben clears his throat, “no, just your clothes and whatever else you want. We have all the linens and things already up there. Dad or Luke will probably pick up whatever groceries we’ll need on the way up, and uh—Oh! If you want to bring a book or any movies in particular or whatever. There’s some stuff up there, but mostly it’s stuff that only Luke would enjoy, so we typically try to bring things to watch and whatever, just so we don’t have to resort to that.”

Rey chuckles. “Okay, got it. I’ll try to find some things I think your family would like too. Come to think of it, I don’t even know what kind of movies _you_ like.”

“I’m not picky,” Ben mumbles. “Really, I don’t spend a lot of time at home, so I don’t really stay up to date on any kind of…entertainment.”

“Now why does that not surprise me?”

“Well, think of this as an opportunity to bring me up to date. Something tells me you have a lot of opinions on pop culture.”

“That is…” Rey begins, her attempt to sound outraged at his accusation dwindling rapidly into resignation, “fair, honestly, that’s fair. I do have a lot of opinions on pop culture. But it’s not my fault though, because some of it is just so, so bad, and clearly people can’t be trusted not to consume shitty content, so really, I mean, what choice do I have?”

“None, clearly. I mean, when has trying to argue someone out of their bad opinions ever not worked?”

“Exactly, exactly!” she hollers.

Rey likes his sarcasm, his deadpan delivery. She even likes the way he can call her out and make her laugh at herself where normally she might just get defensive. It’s something that he’s uniquely good at, she thinks, letting her know that she can have silly opinions or do quirky things without making her feel as if she’s wrong for them, as if he’s judging her by them. His lack of concern for all things mainstream is surprisingly charming, where on anyone else it would likely just read as pretentious. With Ben, it’s not that he’s rejecting things because they’re too popular—often, he isn’t rejecting them at all. As far as she’s seen, he’s much more receptive than it might seems like he would be, allowing himself to be exposed to things outside his norm and doing his best to have no preconceived notions about them. It’s like he has this awareness about his detachment—he knows that his life is largely separate from “normal” things, but instead of being defensive about it, he’s openminded, if not exactly curious. It’s more than a little endearing, the way Ben is willing to let himself be led, and Rey can’t help wondering if maybe that’s something that’s unique to his interactions with her. She wonders if it’s wrong that she sort of likes that idea.

“Did you have any other questions, Rey?”

“I—” she chewed on the inside of her lower lip, knowing the answer but eager to find a reason to keep him on the phone, just for a few more minutes. “I can’t think of any.”

“Well, if you do, feel free to call back. I’ll be up for a while.”

“Right. I’m sure you have packing to do too.”

Ben thinks about the bags already sitting next to his bedroom door, just waiting for him to collect them the following afternoon. “Something like that.”

“Okay, well, I should let you go then. Thanks for the help, Ben.”

“Anytime, sweetheart. And seriously, feel free to call or text or whatever if you think of anything else. I’m around.”

“Thanks, Ben, I appreciate it.”

“I guess I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Unless you think of something else and then—yeah. If I don’t hear from you again, have a good night, Rey.”

“You, too. Night, Ben.”

Rey is reluctant to hang up the phone, though there’s no real reason for her to feel that way, she knows. She does it anyway.

As she works on picking out clothes for the weekend and packing them in an attempt at organization, she tries to make sense of herself. She doesn’t date—that’s what had landed her in this situation in the first place, after all—but it’s not such a foreign concept to her that she can’t identify when she’s attracted to someone, and Ben is definitely attractive. She’d seen right away that first moment at the bar how obviously good looking he is, but as she’s gotten to know him and been repeatedly surprised by his personality—alternately so confident and so uncertain, much more good-humored than he looks like he would be with his serious suits and somber features, and exceedingly kind in a way that she might have expected if she had learned first that he was Han and Leia’s son—there’s something else there. It’s not _just_ that he’s attractive—Rey genuinely likes him. She likes the way he laughs and his quick wit and his good heart and the impulsive streak that had landed them both here, preparing to spend an entire weekend with his family.

But the thing is, she doesn’t do this, and there is a list of reasons why not. She’s never been particularly good at the kind of intimacy romantic relationships demand. It’s always felt forced and often unnatural to her, putting herself and her emotions so much in the hands of someone else. In the years since she’d grown into adulthood, gone to college, started working at Resistance, Rey knows she has made tremendous progress from the skittish, angry girl who was determined not to care for anyone since anyone she cared for tended to disappoint or disappear. Her friends had patiently prodded and pried and waited for her to open up to them, and Rey had discovered the immense freedom that comes with realizing that being an adult in a new place meant that she didn’t have to tell anyone anything that she didn’t want them to know. She let them in little by little, Finn most of all, and somewhere along the way it had occurred to her that there was no such thing as certainty in any relationship—anyone could leave her at any time. More importantly though, she had realized that impermanence was not the end-all-be-all; she had been left before, and while it had done its own kind of damage, Rey had survived. She could do it again if she had to.

Still, those realizations had yet to make her more eager to pursue romance with anyone. She had been on lots of first dates since starting college, but the number diminished dramatically for second dates or anything after. The longest she had been with someone was a few months, and that had been years ago and very casual. Eventually she had realized that she mostly regarded dating as a thing she was supposed to do, rather than something she wanted to do, and since then, she had done it a lot less. When people pressed her on it, she told them she had just had different priorities, that she was focusing on other things, that she was too busy to worry about meeting someone. It wasn’t untrue, but it maybe also wasn’t the _whole_ truth. As much as her friends had helped her overcome many of her emotional hang-ups, dating just felt _different_. Like the impermanence she had come to accept in her friendships was multiplied and still loomed large over the concept of a relationship. In Rey’s mind, being with someone—for more than a few dates, anyway—meant necessarily making herself vulnerable to them. If she were to let herself commit to someone, she would have to let herself rely on them. Unlike her friendships, it didn’t feel like she could pick and choose the pieces of herself she wanted to give to a romantic partner—she might be able to take her time about it, but it would still amount to giving all or nothing.

And then there were the small things. She had had two roommates during college, both of whom were perfectly nice if a little distant, and after graduation, she had started living with Finn, which had been much more of a learning curve than she had anticipated. Did she really want to have to contend with someone else like that? The discomfort of exposing your insignificant quirks and habits—like her eating habits, the amount of time she spends binge-watching, etc.—was no big deal, but then there were all the other little things that conspired together to make someone’s life. The necessary negotiation of reconciling things like someone else’s schedule and preferences and habits to her own was a less than thrilling prospect. Addressing things like hygiene and bathroom habits and whether or not they snored was even less appealing. Rey was pretty sure that if she never had to sit through another uncomfortable holiday dinner with someone’s semi-racist relatives again, she would be happier for it.

_But you already know Ben’s family_ , the little voice in her head prodded. _You liked them before you liked him_.

It couldn’t be that simple, could it? The odds of finding someone you can put up with for the rest of your life are astronomical. Then again, the odds of walking into a bar in the city and sitting down next to the son of your boss/mentor who proposes to be your fake boyfriend are bound to be lesser still, and yet…

Rey draws the zipper around the outer edge of the beat up suitcase she had bought before leaving the UK and tries to bring herself back to reality. There is too much going on in her head, and whatever else may or may not happen in the future, the sun would still rise, she would still have to drag herself into work, and a weekend with the Solo-Organa-Skywalker family would still be waiting for her on the other side.

She quickly uses the restroom, brushes her teeth, washes her face. It’s not far from midnight, but she doesn’t think she would be able to fall straight into bed and go to sleep, so she ventures into the living room. Rey doesn’t expect to find Finn sitting with his legs stretched out over the couch cushions, but she isn’t surprised by the sight. She skirts around the furniture until she can plop down, pushing his feet closer to back of the couch and swinging hers up to lay in front of him.

“Hey, Peanut,” Finn greets her, continuing to scroll through whatever’s on his phone screen. “You all packed?”

Rey hums in the affirmative, sighing and tipping her head over until it leans heavily on the cushion beside her.

“So you managed to get your wardrobe crisis or whatever sorted out?” Finn still hasn’t bothered to look up at her, although his tone is a little mocking.

“You’re just mad that Rose was paying attention to me and not you at work this afternoon.” He doesn’t deny it, not that it would do any good if he had. “You know, since I’m going to be gone anyway, maybe you should use this opportunity to actually make a move on that girl.”

“Ugh.” Finn throws his head back, phone dropping to his lap. “Do you really want to nag me about this now?”

“What? Of course I do. When do I not want to nag you about this?”

“I don’t know, maybe since you started ‘pretending’ to date your boss’ son.”

“What is with the air quotes?”

“What do you mean?”

Rey rolls her eyes. “You’re supposed to use air quotes when you’re saying something that you don’t mean, but I _am_ pretending to date my boss’ son, soooo?”

It’s Finn’s turn to roll his eyes. “You are not this oblivious, Rey. I used air quotes because, well, are you really pretending to date him, or are you just, you know, actually dating him?”

His question hits a little too close to home for Rey after the direction her thoughts had tended in earlier. She doesn’t mean to be defensive about it, but it happens all the same. It shoots her anger from zero to sixty immediately.

“I am pretending to date him, which is more than you can say for you and Rose. You know, you’re not the only one who sees how great she is, and she’s not going to wait forever. Eventually, someone else is going to make a move, and she’s going to think, ‘well, Finn’s had every opportunity—if he wanted me, he’d have done something by now.’”

“That’s not fair, Rey, and you know it.”

“Maybe not,” she snaps, swinging her feet back toward the floor. “You know what else isn’t fair? You dragging her around, making her wait on you over and over and over again. You could have her, Finn, and if you weren’t such a coward about it, you already would. And what’s more is that you know I’m right! And you still won’t do anything about it!”

“What the fuck is your problem, Rey?!”

“I am not the one with the problem here, Finn, because at least I don’t have any delusions about the situation I’m in.”

“You’re not? You don’t have any delusions about your relationship with Ben? No? Then why the hell are you pretending to date him in the first place? Why did you agree to this weekend away, like you can just go and play house with all of them and it won’t change anything? This whole thing with you two is nothing _but_ delusion! And you know why? Because you’re scared—you can lie to yourself, Rey, but you can’t lie to me—you are absolutely fucking terrified of what might happen if you let yourself actually feel something for someone, if you were willing to take the risk that you could maybe have something real if you would just let someone in for once!”

“Fuck you, Finn. I don’t need this shit.” She’s standing, every line of her body drawn taut and defensive, and Finn scrambles up until he’s nearly mimicking her posture.

“Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead and act like you don’t know that I’m completely right. And that’s the difference, Rey. I know you’re right. I won’t deny it. I’m scared of not getting what I want. But you are scared of wanting anything at all.”

Rey doesn’t have anything left to say, and Finn doesn’t look like he’s in a fit state for them to carry on screaming at each other either. They stare fuming and silent at one another, and then in an instant, they both retreat, stomping off to their respective bedrooms and slamming doors behind them.

Rey lays fitful in her bed. She’s furious and hurt and filled with regret and shame and frustration. Tears roll over her bare face and her thoughts swirl haplessly until exhaustion overtakes her and she falls into a restless darkness much less hospitable than sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry


	7. Could We Have Missed This If We'd Never Met?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The weekend begins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, so, I'm officially out of control. This chapter is even longer than the last one! I hope that will somewhat make up for the delay in getting this chapter out. I should maybe also mention that I work at a university that started the fall semester this week, so I'm juggling more "real life" alongside the fun stuff, like writing this fic. Updates will not stop, but they may occasionally take a little longer than I'd like. 
> 
> Anyway, enjoy! Comments give me life, and also make me laugh very hard, which I'm a big fan of.

“Waking” is entirely too charitable a term for what Rey does the following morning. She’s hardly slept, instead spending the hours nauseous and tormented about what she’d said to Finn. He hadn’t deserved it; she knew even as she was saying it that while there might be truth in what she said, it wasn’t something she had any right to throw in his face like she had.

She is nearly as tortured by what he had said to her in return. She hated the way his words kept ringing in her head _— “You are scared of wanting anything at all.”_

Since she’d met him, Finn had always had a knack for reading her. It wasn’t just that he knew her well or that they had grown very close very quickly. Finn possessed some uncanny ability to just inherently understand Rey—what she meant when she couldn’t find the right words, what she was feeling when she wouldn’t say anything at all, and as evidenced the previous evening, what she pretended to not even know about herself. Finn just _gets_ her, and while normally that’s something she loves about their relationship, a large part of her wishes at this moment that they were a little less attuned to one another.

She has tossed and turned and managed to doze in and out of wakefulness for a few hours when her nerves start itching, urging her to get up, to get on with her day. She hadn’t been in any frame of mind to remember to set her alarm the previous evening, but as exhausted as she is, her brain nudges incessantly at her that if she doesn’t get up now, she’ll be late for work. It isn’t true—she’s actually awake nearly half an hour before she would have even started snoozing her normal alarm, but if she stays in bed, she’ll only get more anxious. And that is the last thing she needs to add to the knot of stress laying leaden in her stomach.

She goes through the motions of showering, brushing her teeth, getting dressed. She runs a bit of product through her hair and leaves it to airdry, though usually she winds up pulling it up during the course of the day anyway. She puts on the bare minimum of her makeup. Because she already has the time, she goes ahead and pulls out the clothes she plans to change into that afternoon for her drive to Montauk with Ben. She’ll have to come back and get her bags, and she had determined as soon as she started packing that she didn’t own anything that was both appropriate for work and comfortable for a long drive.

Rey feels foolish opening her bedroom door slowly, creeping out into her own damn hallway, skulking around the apartment she pays for half of, but after their blowout, she’s more than a little apprehensive about encountering Finn. She won’t feel right until she has apologized, she knows, but those kinds of heartfelt sincere interactions have never been something she’s either good at or comfortable with. She tiptoes into the kitchen and starts the coffeemaker like she does every morning. Like every other day, she makes enough for herself and to fill the thermos that Finn travels to and from work with each day.

With her nerves still frayed and her stomach still roiling like it is, Rey doesn’t think she can eat much. She knows better than to go without anything though, so she eats a banana and a couple handfuls of granola. She decides against taking something in for lunch, figuring that by the time it rolls around, she’ll be more than ready for a reason to get out of the office for a while.

Although she’ll likely be the first one into the office—which has happened maybe once in her years of working for Resistance—Rey decides to go on in. Usually, she and Finn take the subway together, sometimes split a Lyft ride if they’re feeling lazy, but she doesn’t feel ready—not to discuss what had happened last night, and not to pretend like nothing had—so it’s an easy decision to make to leave without him. She thinks she can hear him stirring in his room down the hall. She gathers her things as quickly as she can, ducking back into her room to grab shoes, and donning both them and the slightly oversized leather purse she generally carries. Pausing in the kitchen, Rey rips the top sheet off the magnetic notepad stuck to their fridge. She scribbles a note that simply says: _I hate that you’re right. I’m sorry, Peanut_ , and slips the corner of it under Finn’s thermos.

As he leaves his bedroom, Rey pulls the front door closed with a solid _click_ that echoes through the still apartment.

\--

By the time people start trickling into the office, Rey is already barricaded behind her desktop computer, working feverishly on things that she knows could wait until next week, at least. Truth be told, there’s not really much she needs to get done today, and though she would normally relish the light workload, it’s just not what she needs today. So, she works ahead, on anything she can find to do.

She’s typing her seventeenth email of the morning when Poe comes into their shared office and settles at his desk.

“Hey, sunshine. You look…awful, actually. Are you okay?”

She keeps typing, leaving his question hanging unanswered in the air for a moment as she finishes off her sentence. “Finn and I had a fight last night, and I said some really shitty things to him, and he said some shitty things back, and I didn’t sleep, like, at all, and Ben and I are going with his family to Luke’s cabin for the weekend, and Ben is a whole _other_ issue, and—”

She cuts herself off just in time to keep from revealing herself to Poe. After all, telling someone you think you might have feelings for someone you’re supposedly already dating would be fairly difficult to explain.

“Wow, uh. That’s—that’s a lot.”

She hums in agreement, going back to her email and hoping that Poe will, for once, leave well enough alone.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

“Weeeeell, tough tits.” Poe comes over and perches with one thigh and ass cheek up on the edge of her desk, the other leg in the floor supporting his weight. “What did you and Finn fight about?”

There’s no way that she can answer the question without the truth about her “relationship” with Ben coming out, and there is no way that Poe will be able to sit on a secret like that. She knows from experience just how much trouble Poe’s big mouth can cause, even if he doesn’t mean for it to.

Rey sighs heavily, leaning back from her desk so that she’s upright rather than hunched forward toward the screen as she had been. “Honestly, I don’t even know. I can’t even remember how it started; I just know that I said some really awful things to him about Rose and being a coward and…ugh.” She tips forward again, laying her forehead flat against the cool, slightly tacky surface of the sealed wood. “I was such a dick to him, Poe, and he didn’t do anything to deserve it.”

He shrugs. “So you apologize. This is Finn we’re talking about; it’s not as if he’s never going to forgive you. And I’m sure he feels as bad about it as you do.”

That thought offers no comfort. Maybe he should feel as badly as she does, because she had meant it when she told Poe that Finn gave her as good as he got last night. They had both handled the whole thing horribly, but the thought of Finn walking around feeling as shitty and regretful as she does is difficult for her to stomach nonetheless.

“You should just go to his office and apologize to him. We all know that neither of you will be any use to anyone until you deal with whatever the issue is. And freaky as they are, your Wonder Twin powers are important to both of you. Just talk to him, Rey. He probably wants to get past it just as much as you do.”

“I’ll talk to him,” she concedes. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know she would have to anyway, but hearing Poe out is an extra push to deal with it sooner rather than later.

“Now, next problem,” Poe says. “You and Benny are going away for the weekend with who, his parents and Luke?” He sounds entirely too gleeful about the whole thing, but less in an ‘Wow, I’m impressed that you guys are at that stage of your relationship’ way and more in a ‘HAHAHA I hope Han and Luke give you shit all weekend and Leia pressures you to get married and have babies immediately’ kind of way.

“You know he hates it when you call him that.” Poe’s response is to grin deviously and nod enthusiastically. “Leia basically insisted.” He cackles and mutters something like, “sounds about right,” but Rey ignores him and goes on. “Besides, I think it might actually be nice. I mean, I’ve never been to a cabin before; I’ve never been to Montauk. And it’s not as if I don’t already know his family. I’ve known the three of them way longer than I’ve known Ben.”

“Yes, but we’re not talking about badass boss lady Leia and her cool husband who tells slightly inappropriate jokes and shares his scotch with you.”

“We’re not?”

“No. We are talking about potential mother-in-law Leia who wants the best for her beloved only son.”

“And Han?”

Poe shrugs, his face resigned. “Han is Han; there’s only so much you can do with that. He’ll probably be pretty much the same as always.”

“Thank god for that. And why wouldn’t he be? Why wouldn’t they all be? They’ve known me for years, Poe, it’s not like they’re going to feel the need to grill me so they can assess my eligibility to marry into the family. Hell, they probably know me better than they know Ben at this point. And Luke definitely likes me more than he likes Ben!”

Poe cringes, his lips contorting wide and downward to bare his teeth. “Oof, sunshine. I’m not really sure you should count that as a victory, I’m just saying.”

“I don’t count it as a victory, dumbass. Frankly, as much as I care about Luke, he’s been kind of a dick to Ben, and it is totally unnecessary. I’m just saying, I don’t think I need to work myself up about spending the weekend with them because they’re already people I know and like anyway, and I would like to believe they feel the same way about me.”

“I’m just saying.” He throws his hands up defensively. “If it were me, I would be nervous, that’s all. I mean, yeah, you’re basically Leia’s mini-me in the office, and of course they all love you, sunshine—as do we all—but there’s bound to be some weirdness there. Does it not strike you as being a little strange that these people you’ve known in one way are now occupying a whole different role in your life?”

“A little, I guess, I don’t know. I haven’t really thought much about it!”

“Exactly! This weekend is the first time you’re going to be around them for any substantial amount of time as Ben’s girlfriend. And you’ve known about it the whole time, obviously, so if it’s weird for you, just imagine how weird it’s going to be for all of them, because _they_ just found out that you’re now not only Rey, you’re Ben’s-girlfriend-Rey.”

“Is it, like, your mission to stress me out? What the hell is wrong with you, you dummy? Now I’m going to be freaking out about this on top of everything else!”

“I’m sorry! I just…I wasn’t thinking about that, I just said it. You know I just say stuff, Rey!”

“You’re an idiot, Dameron.”

Immediate bursts of loud laughter had not been the reaction she expected, but stranger things have happened, she supposes.

“What’s with you?” Rey cries, flailing her hands frustratedly in his direction.

When he collects himself, Poe’s still wheezing, “I’m sorry, it’s just—you sounded just like Ben when you said that. It just caught me off guard.”

Rey purses her lips and crosses her arms, unimpressed with his amusement. “Ben isn’t the only one who thinks you’re an idiot, Poe, now get your ass off my desk and let me go back to work.”

“Alright, alright,” he grumbles, standing and moving toward his own workspace. He turns and points at her, his face suddenly serious, “But talk to Finn. I mean it. You’ll be miserable all weekend if you don’t.”

She sighs, but nods, dropping her eyes. Satisfied, Poe crosses the small room and settles at his own desk.

They both work quietly for about half an hour before Rey’s phone starts vibrating over the top of the desk. She glances at it, assuming it’s some telemarketer or something and that she’ll simply silence the call and go back to work. Instead, she reads the bold white font at the top of the screen and snatches it up to answer it.

“Ben, hi.”

“Hey, sweetheart.”

Rey shivers ever so slightly, telling herself that it has nothing to do with him or his greeting.

She pivots to something more comfortable than her mounting infatuation—teasing him. “Starting early?”

“Just getting into the spirit,” he chuckles, taking her in stride. “I’m actually calling because I realized we didn’t exactly finalize the details for this afternoon.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess not. Did you have anything in mind?”

“Well, I figured I would drive, because I’m not actually sure if you own a car.”

“I don’t,” she inserts. “Go on.”

“Okay, good. I went ahead and drove into work today, so I can leave straight from here and pick you up. My last meeting should be over by about four, so I can be at your office at about 4:30?”

“Actually, I left my things at home, so can you pick me up there instead?”

“Right—I should have thought of that. Yeah, that’s fine. Can you give me your address?”

“I will…” Rey hesitates, trying to figure out how to tell him ‘I can’t tell you now because Poe is pretending not to listen to me while I’m talking to you.’ She settles for, “I’ll text you in a bit.”

“Oh, do you need to go?” Ben asks, worried that he might be keeping her from something since she is at work now too.

“No, no, go on.”

“Okaaaay, uh. It’s about a three hour drive.”

“I know, I looked it up.”

“Right,” he says, shaking his head at himself. “Well, I figured that if we leave about 4:30, we should be there in time to have dinner and stuff.”

“Sounds good. I got here a little early this morning, so I should be able to cut out a little early and give myself time to run home and change and stuff.”

“Good,” Ben says, and Rey feels like she can see the soft smile his voice conveys. “I think that’s it then. Is there anything you need? No last minute fashion consultations or anything?”

“Oh, shut up, you,” she laughs. “I think I’ve got a handle on it, thank you very much.”

“Oh, you are more than welcome, my dear.”

“Is this going to be a thing with you now? Like, you’re going to hold it over my head all weekend? You’ll ask me for increasingly ridiculous favors and remind me that I owe you for your sage wisdom?”

“Well, _now_ …”

“Sod off, Solo. I’m going to hang up on you and go back to work now.”

“Okay, sweetheart. You’ll text me your address?”

“I will.”

“And I’ll see you about 4:30?”

“You will.”

“Good.”

“Good.”

They hang up, and Rey’s smiling for the first time in hours.

\--

It’s nearly noon when there’s a soft knock at the open doorway of Rey’s office. She looks up from her computer and finds Finn edging his way inside, looking uncertain.

“Come in,” she says softly, nodding when he thanks her.

He stands in front of the small couch they keep there, and Rey is contemplating getting up and rounding her desk to join him there when he asks if she’s had lunch. She mumbles a reply, and he says, “Well, I would ask if you’re hungry, but I’ve never known you to turn down food, so…”

“I could eat,” she tells him, both of them smiling nervously at the other. He steps just outside her office while he waits for her to grab her bag. When she joins him, they walk side by side to the elevator, neither of them speaking.

“So, where do you want to go?” Finn eventually asks as they step out onto the ground floor.

“You pick.”

He tells her that he has a strange craving for something greasy—it’s not all that strange to Rey, who is feeling her own desire for comfort food—so they walk a few blocks to a diner they’ve visited a hundred times before and order thick burgers and fries and a plate of mac and cheese to split.

Up until now, they’ve had something to occupy them, but as they sit opposite one another and wait for their food, there’s nothing standing in the way of the conversation neither of them really wants to have.

“I’m so sorry, Finn,” Rey blurts before he can even finish unwrapping his straw.

He drops his hands, still holding the straw in its paper covering to the laminate tabletop. “God, me too, Peanut. I’m really sorry I pushed you like that.”

“Well, you were right, so—” Rey hedges, but Finn cuts her off, catching her eye as he enunciates his words. “No, Rey, that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if what I said was true. The point is that I shouldn’t have said it. You’re my best friend, but that doesn’t give me any right to make you feel like shit about your feelings and your hang-ups and stuff. There’s no time limit on getting over things that have happened to us, and I hate that I made you feel like I did about it.”

Rey reaches over and covers one of his large hands with her own. Finn layers his other hand on top of hers, and she replicates the gesture. They both smile a little more easily, the sharp thing wedged between them dulling down, slipping back into place so the edges don’t feel so jagged.

“I’m sorry I said those things about Rose. I mean, I do think she’s wonderful and any man would be an idiot not to want someone like her, but you have to know that I didn’t mean it, Finn, when I said she wouldn’t wait for you. She will. She _is_. And if that’s what works for the two of you, then that’s none of my business and I should just support you, whatever happens or doesn’t between you.”

“And your whole…” he removes one hand from their stack and uses it to loosely gesture into the open air, “thing with Ben is none of my business either. I just want you to be happy, Peanut, and I don’t want you to feel like you can’t have something real, like you don’t deserve it, because you absolutely do, Rey. It breaks my heart to think that there’s something you want but won’t let yourself have. You should have everything you want, Rey.”

“You too, Peanut. I want you to have everything you want.”

They share a smile and Rey surreptitiously runs the edge of a finger under each of her eyes. They sit on opposite sides of the booth and fiddle with their cups, taking drinks from their respective glasses.

“So, you’re leaving tonight then?” Finn finally asks.

Rey nods. “He’s picking me up at the apartment after work. I figured I’d duck out a little early so I could change and stuff.”

“Got your packing sorted out then, I guess?” he chuckles, ducking his head in an effort to hide it.

“Jesus, what is it with you boys? I ask about clothes one time and never hear the end of it!”

He laughs loudly now, couldn’t conceal it if he tried, not that he is.

“Are you… How are you feeling about spending an entire weekend with Han and Leia and Luke? And Ben! How are you feeling about spending the weekend with _Ben_?”

“Oh god, not you, too!” When Finn shoots her a confused look, Rey rolls her eyes. “Poe basically gave me a whole lecture about how weird this weekend could potentially be and why I should be nervous about all of it.”

“I don’t think there is a ‘should be’ here. You just feel how you feel.”

“I don’t really know how to feel,” she sighs, just as their waitress comes over with a tray full of food.

Once she’s passed their plates over and Finn and Rey have both started eating, Rey tries to explain.

“I guess I’m a little nervous, but not because of the whole ‘meet the parents’ thing. I mean, I already know them, and I think I can safely say that they like me well enough.”

“They love you,” he says around a mouth full of fries, an unimpressed expression leveled at her.

“Maybe, but really it’s Ben I’m more worried about. Things with him and his family are…complicated anyway. And we’ve really only spent a few hours together, and now we’re going to be together for an entire weekend.”

They’re both chewing and talking alternately, getting a few words out before taking another bite.

“But you’ve talked a lot though, right?”

“I don’t know if I would say ‘a lot,’ but yeah, we’ve talked. And we’re adults, you know, so it’s not even like I’m worried about the weirdness of sharing a bed with this guy I hardly know or worrying about if his parents think we’re having sex or whatever.”

Finn mutters with a full mouth, “I would be nervous about those things,” but Rey ignores him.

“It’s more like, what if I spend a day with him and find out that I don’t actually like who he is?”

“Do you really think that’s going to happen, Rey? I’m just saying, you’re a great judge of character—after everything you’ve been through, you’d kind of have to be, you know? I think if you were going to wind up hating him, you already would.”

Rey starts to say something but falters. If she says what she’s thinking now, it will be out there for real and for good. There will be no more denying it, no more pretending it hasn’t been circling in her thoughts for days now.

It comes out first as a whisper too faint to hear in the cacophony of the busy restaurant. Finn studies her curiously as her mouth moves seemingly soundlessly. Rey clears her throat and speaks again, now audible but still quiet, “What if he doesn’t actually like _me_?”

Finn stops with his burger halfway to his mouth, his hands drifting downward until his forearms are leaning on the edge of the table. “Rey, I seriously don’t think that’s possible. I mean, I don’t know the guy, but he doesn’t strike me as someone who puts himself in situations he doesn’t want to be in. And didn’t you say it was his idea to pretend to be your boyfriend? And he, like, hit on you or something, when you first met him?”

“That’s not the same thing though. There’s a huge difference in thinking someone is attractive and actually liking them as a person. We had a good time at the bar that night and at the party, but other than one lunch, since then it’s just been a few phone calls and stuff. There’s still so much we don’t know about each other. What if he spends a day with me and—”

“I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about, Peanut. From the few minutes I saw you two together—well, at the risk of picking up where we left off last night, you both looked pretty cozy together.”

She shoots him a look like he’s missed something incredibly obvious.

“I know that was the whole point. But…either you’re both much better actors than I think you are, or there’s something there, Rey.”

Rey sighs heavily, staring wide-eyed and conflicted. She’s torn between wanting to believe him—to be a little bit optimistic and think that maybe there really might be something more than make believe between she and Ben—and brushing him off, reminding herself she knows better, that nothing in her life has ever come so easily and this will be no exception.

“Worst case scenario,” Finn reasons, “you spend the weekend together and realize that attraction is all it is. You guys find a way to fake break-up and decide to never see each other again, which you could probably mostly pull off because you’d have the excuse of being exes.”

“The worst case scenario is that Leia finds out we’ve lied to her and then she stops trusting me and she and Ben stop speaking again. Ben would blame me, and then he would stop speaking to me too. And then I’d lose all of them, and Leia would fire me, and I’d have to start all over again.”

“Okay, dude, you are spiraling. Take a breath, eat some fries, and listen to me. You are wonderful, and even if Leia found out—which she won’t—she would understand. She might be pissed for a couple of days, but she would never fire you or stop trusting you or any of that other crazy stuff you just said. Ben would never have suggested this—and he _is_ the one who suggested it—if he wasn’t at least a little bit interested in _actually_ being your boyfriend. The poor guy will be lucky if he makes it through the weekend and doesn’t come home half in love with you. And even if you decide that nothing is going to happen between you two, if nothing else, you’re getting a nice weekend away and one hell of a story to tell people later.”

Rey loses her train of thought as soon as the word “love” comes out of Finn’s mouth. It feels impossible and terrifying, so much so that she can hardly bear to think about it. She has never been in love, has never even come close to it with any of the people she’s been with before. Of all the ways she has imagined things going with Ben, falling in love with him has never even crossed her mind. It’s there now though, and something tells Rey that there will be no getting rid of it.

\--

Rey shifts the conversation away from the weekend as quickly as possible after that, and they finish their lunch and the subsequent walk back to the office as they would on any other day.

She gets back to the office and remembers to text Ben the address of her apartment. Poe asks where she has been, and when she tells him, he asks if she and Finn had gotten everything worked out. Her confirmation that they had leads him to gloat in a way that is entirely unwarranted until she puts headphones on, her actions pointedly exaggerated.

Rey works quietly at her desk without paying much mind to the passing time. She is so determined to focus on something that isn’t the weekend looming over her that she doesn’t even notice Leia’s entrance into the office. It isn’t until the older woman stands in front of Rey’s desk and bends herself at the waist that her form catches Rey’s eye. She jerks the headphones out of her ears and offers her boss a smile.

“Sorry about that.”

“Don’t be,” Leia waves her off. “I just wanted to stop in and ask about your plans for the afternoon.”

Rey wrinkles her brow minutely, but enough that Leia notices and looks at her like it should be obvious what she’s asking.

“You and Ben? Have you decided what time you’re leaving this afternoon?”

“Oh! Right, of course,” Rey blushes. “Sorry, Leia, I’m a bit out of it today.”

“You feeling okay?”

“I’m fine. I just, uh, didn’t get much sleep last night.”

It is obvious as soon as Rey says it that Leia is thinking of something entirely different than what actually kept Rey up. Rey fumbles for words, trying to convey that she’s gotten the wrong idea, but Leia just laughs brightly and waves her off.

“Oh, honey, don’t worry about it. I may be his mother, but I’m not under any delusions about you and Ben waiting for marriage or whatever else. In fact, you could say that I’m not under any delusions about it _because_ I’m his mother. You’ve got to remember that I did a lot of his laundry when he was a teenager, and Benny has always been private, but he has _never_ been subtle.” Leia is too entertained by herself to even notice the eyes-as-big-as-saucers flabbergasted look that Rey is wearing. “I know better than to think that he’s capable of keeping his hands off of you. God, that boy really is so much like his father, I swear.”

Rey can’t speak, couldn’t even if she had any notion of what the hell she is supposed to say to something like that. It sort of feels like she’s swallowed her tongue. She can’t even yell at Poe who is doing a piss poor job of muffling his own laughter on the other side of the room. She makes a mental note to berate him later, and to do her best to make sure he never, ever tells Ben that he had heard any of what Leia just said about him. She’s embarrassed on his behalf, so Rey can only imagine the reaction that Ben might have.

“Anyway, I wanted to make sure that you would be leaving in time to have dinner with us tonight. I’m on my way out now, actually, and we’re heading straight up there, so we’ll have plenty of time to get groceries and things. We figured that Han could cook for us all tonight and then tomorrow evening we’ll go to this great little restaurant in town.”

When she realizes that Leia is indeed waiting on a response from her, Rey shakes herself as subtly as she can and says, “That sounds great.”

Leia still looks expectantly at her, and Rey is just about to ask her what her question had been in the first place when Leia says, “So you’ll be there in time then?”

“Oh! Yeah, yes, we’re um, Ben is picking me up at my place about 4:30, and he says it’s about three hours to the cabin, so we should get there right around dinnertime. I would ask if you want us there earlier than that, but Ben’s last meeting won’t finish up until around 4:00 anyway, so.”

Rey thinks how fortuitous it was that Ben happened to tell her his afternoon’s schedule when they’d spoken earlier in the day. Those were the kinds of details that a devoted girlfriend probably _would_ know about her boyfriend, right? At any rate, Leia looks satisfied with her response, and that’s what really counts here.

“No worries. 7:30-ish is perfect. We’ll have everything ready when you two get there.” She turns and starts moving toward the door, stopping only a couple of steps away from where she’d started at the edge of Rey’s desk and turning to face her again. “Oh, and make sure one of you lets us know when you get on the road. I’ll try to remember to text Ben if we hit any traffic on the way up so you two can avoid it.” She turns once more and makes it all the way to the doorway before she looks back at Rey and says, surprisingly heartfelt, “I’m so glad we’re doing this. I can’t tell you how excited I am about it.”

It makes something in Rey’s chest both tighten and release all at once. “We’re really excited too, Leia. It was a great idea; I’m glad you suggested it.”

Leia smiles at her fondly, like she’s done a thousand times in the years Rey has known her, but it feels somehow different this time. More sincere. More vulnerable. Rey has always known, even before she’d ever laid eyes on him, how much Ben means to Leia, even though she knows now that it hasn’t always felt that way to him. But there’s something about seeing the evidence of her affection for him—for both of them, maybe—on her face now that makes Rey realize the full weight of what they’re doing. There are a hundred different ways that this could end, and it’s unlikely that any of them won’t involve Leia getting hurt. It breaks Rey’s heart a little to think that she’s set this woman she cares so much for up to take that kind of fall, and she knows that however things turn out, she will be absolutely desperate to protect Leia as much as possible in the process. Rey is pretty sure that Ben has no idea of the depth of Leia’s love for him, of the power that he holds over her just by virtue of his existence. As scared as she is of getting hurt herself, she knows it would be worse to see it happen to Leia because she recognizes that it would be at least half her fault.

There is a moment, as she watches Leia retreat from her office entirely and listens to her low heels clicking over the floor, where Rey wishes that she had not put any of them in this position with her stupid, needless lie. She thinks about how much better a crappy date with a perfect stranger would have been in comparison to the potential fallout of the lie she told to avoid it, and she feels sincere guilt for ever having done so. But at that same moment, there is a flicker somewhere in her brain that reminds her that if she had not told the lie, she never would have been in that bar, never would have sat down next to a handsome man and found herself swept into the orbit of Ben Solo’s life. Maybe they would have met at the party—maybe Ben was right when he joked about Leia even trying to set them up herself. She thinks about what it might have been like if things had gone that way, tries to tell herself that she might still have wound up here, that it might have even been better because her relationship with Ben might have been real.

But no, it never would have been this. She would have only been frustrated at him for his absenteeism from his parents’ lives. He wouldn’t have looked twice at her, if for no other reason than Ben would rather die alone than let his mother choose a woman for him. They never would have shared the birthday gifts, or their stories, or the relatively few hours that they had so far.

It is absolutely and utterly terrifying to realize that if she had it to do over again, she would change none of it. Not if it meant taking the risk of missing out on Ben.

\--

At 3:57, Rey skitters out of the elevator and onto the sidewalk in front of the building. In the interest of giving herself an extra five minutes to try and make herself look like something other than a sleep-deprived mess who’s spent almost eight hours at her desk, she splurges on an Uber.

While she’s in the car, she tries to think about everything she’s packed for the weekend. She needs to grab some last minute items, things she had used this morning before she’d left for work. Leia had mentioned a restaurant—would it be fancy? Would she need something nicer than what she had planned? Surely not, right? Because while Leia (and probably Ben) may have been thrilled by the prospect of a pretentious meal, Han and Luke would not be. Ben had made it sound like the town around Luke’s cabin was a small, quaint place, but Rey honestly has no idea what Montauk is like, or if his cabin is even in Montauk or just near it. She wishes she had done some more googling in preparation, and she’s just about to start in on it when the car rolls to stop at the curb in front of her building.

She exits, tipping generously as she rushes to get to her apartment. The ride had taken long enough that now she only has about fifteen minutes before Ben will turn up—because she just knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is going to be frustratingly punctual.

When she gets inside, she throws her keys, purse, and phone onto the kitchen counter and darts for her bedroom door, stripping out of her shirt on the way. She doesn’t have time to shower, not that she really needs to after having done so this morning, but she’s feeling abnormally paranoid about her appearance, so she strips her bra off as well, opting to put on one of the less-comfortable-but-nicer-looking ones that she keeps in the back of the drawer. The bottom half follows suit, her skirt from work dropping to the floor next to her dresser, and her underwear just after it. Once again, she fishes around near the back of the drawer and pulls out a pair of cotton panties with lace paneling in a dark green color that more or less match the bra she’d put on, not unpleasant to wear, but not necessarily a go-to. She tugs them up her legs and is just about to slide the drawer shut and move on to her microscopic Manhattan closet when her eyes land on the one nice set of lingerie she owns—skimpy black lace made delicate by how entirely sheer it is. It’s underwear that’s meant to be seen, not worn.

Her face flushes just looking at it lying there, pushed to the back of the drawer by disuse. Packing this lingerie would incontrovertibly mean that some part of her is hoping this weekend will give her occasion to wear it. For Ben.

She’s frozen for a moment before the sound of honking outside startles her back to reality and she realizes she’s just wasted time even thinking it over. She closes the drawer and heads to her closet where that morning she had moved the outfit she plans to put on so it hung right next to the door. Stretchy jeans that hug her toned thighs and a deep green sweater with oversized tortoiseshell buttons on the shoulders. She dresses quickly, ducking into the bathroom to fluff her hair and check that her makeup hasn’t smudged too badly during the day.

She slips back into her closet and grabs some shoes, a pair of low-heeled, brown, vegan leather boots that she’d found at a ridiculous discount. She takes one more glance around her room, trying to make sure she has everything she’ll need.

She drags her bag into the kitchen, taking a couple of minutes to pull things she won’t need out of her purse—the planner she uses to keep track of her work meetings, the collection of pens she uses to color-code the planner, a half-eaten bag of gummy bears that she doesn’t remember buying (which likely means they’ve been in there much too long), some old receipts and other scraps of paper. It will take her longer to clean out this purse than it will to get a different one, she realizes, so she treks back to her bedroom to do just that.

She goes back to her closet and finds a medium sized leather crossbody bag in a warm burgundy color. It’s a designer bag, but one that hasn’t been popular since the 1980s, so she’d bought it secondhand at a reasonable price. It makes her feel stylish and put together whenever she carries it, and as frazzled as she’s been all day, Rey figures she can use all the help she can get.

When she comes out of the closet to head back to the kitchen, her eyes fix once more on her dresser, where she notices the drawer she’d been digging in earlier hadn’t shut all the way, a bit of fabric wadded up and wedged into the opening.

Rey huffs, stepping over to adjust it, which she can only do by opening the drawer once more. Once it’s open, her gaze falls immediately on black lace, and she feels the heat in her face even as she rolls her eyes at herself. It doesn’t stop her from reaching in, drawing the scant fabric out, and slamming the drawer closed behind her. She can’t even look at the items clenched in her hand, refuses to acknowledge what she knows this means. It’s sort of the same as when toddlers are learning to play hide and seek and they somehow all fall under the impression that if they can’t see you, you can’t see them.

She beats a hasty retreat to the kitchen and immediately unzips her bag, stuffs the lingerie inside, and rezips the pocket as quickly as possible. _Out of sight, out of mind_ , she thinks, and then rolls her eyes at the absurdity of it. There is no way she won’t be thinking about the black lace hiding amid the rest of her clothes for much of the weekend, and she knows it.

“Honestly, Rey, what the fuck is wrong with you?” she grumbles under her breath although there’s no one else around to hear her.

She turns her attention back to the purse still in her other hand and starts pulling things she needs from her work bag and stuffing them into the smaller one. She’s only just gotten her wallet inside when her phone starts vibrating on the counter, and she doesn’t need to look at it to know that it’s Ben.

“Hi,” she answers, trying to make her voice steadier than it seems inclined to be at the moment.

“Hey, uh, I’m downstairs. I would have come up and knocked like a decent boyfriend,” he chuckles, “but I’m pretty sure I’m parked illegally, so—”

“No, that’s fine, I’ll, um, be right down.”

“Okay. You sure you don’t need help with your suitcase or whatever?”

Something about the question strikes her as being so sweet and so absurd all at once that it makes her feel suddenly like she’s on more familiar footing. She even manages to sound a little mocking when she tells him, “I’m pretty sure I can manage, Prince Charming.”

It makes him laugh, and the sound makes her smile. She’s reminded of how excited she had initially felt at the idea of hanging out with him for a weekend. Granted, she hadn’t felt…quite as much about him then as she does now, but still. Last Sunday, when he had unnecessarily tried to convince her that the weekend at the cabin would be a good idea, she had been looking forward to getting to know him more, to just having a reason to spend time with him. He makes her laugh, he’s (so far) unfailingly sweet to her, and it’s been a long time since Rey had someone flirt with her like he does—though she doesn’t think she’s had anyone who was at once so confident and so awkward flirt with her ever. She collects the last of her things and heads down to Ben’s car, determined to enjoy this weekend without her own stupid feelings and the anxiety they cause getting in her way.

Rey finds him standing on the sidewalk, absurdly tall and unfairly handsome as ever before. She thinks she covers it pretty well when he surprises her by leaning down and pressing a kiss to her cheek as he takes her small suitcase from her hand and loads it into the trunk of his car.

It’s a _nice_ car, she notices, not that she’d really expected anything less from someone as posh as Ben. The sleek black Porsche Panamera Turbo idling by the curb in front of her is exactly the kind of car she could have imagined Ben in, had she ever thought about it. Rey’s interest in cars had never been anything but hypothetical until she met Han, who had eagerly taken her to the garage he had opened with his best friend, Chewie, and given her the hands-on experience she’d been lacking. He’d taught her everything she had asked him about and then some, fostering the interest she’d had since she was a kid in the UK. Now, her appreciation for the vehicle was more than just aesthetic.

“This car is gorgeous,” she tells him as she settles herself in the passenger seat. “Do I even want to know how much it cost?”

“Probably not,” Ben chuckles, a little self-deprecatingly. “It’s not like I bought the thing outright, if that helps.”

“It absolutely does not. But I suppose as your pretend-girlfriend, I should just consider it a perk.”

“I can’t imagine there are many,” he mumbles, and Rey is sure she wasn’t supposed to hear him.

“Are you kidding? I’m in the nicest car I’ve ever even gotten close to on the way to a fancy cabin I don’t have to pay to stay in on the New York coast where I am spending a weekend with people I like. Even if that were all of the benefits—which it is _not_ —that would be more than enough. And I didn’t even mention the view!”

“It is really pretty up there, but I didn’t think you’d ever been there before?”

Rey giggles as she says, “I was talking about you, dummy.”

He can’t really look at her now that they’re out on the road in city traffic, but he whips his head from the windshield to the passenger seat a few times in quick succession when he asks her, “Me? What about me?”

“I meant that _you_ are a nice view, Ben.”

He sounds shocked, maybe even a little outraged this time. “What?!” Rey looks over to find his cheeks pink and eyes wide in the already-dimming October light.

“You’re gorgeous, Solo. You can’t honestly be surprised that I noticed.”

“Rey, I am one hundred percent serious when I tell you that no one has _ever_ called me gorgeous. _You_ are gorgeous; I’m maybe mildly attractive in an unconventional way, at best.”

She turns fully sideways in her seat to stare at him, even if he can’t look back at her. “You are incredibly attractive, Ben. Whether other people have told you that or not, I promise you, they’ve thought it. You’re hot, buddy, there’s no getting around it.”

“I—” he struggles. “I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one. Can we maybe change the subject?”

“As long as you understand that I am right and you are wrong, yes, we can.”

Ben releases a laugh as one forceful exhale, clenching and unclenching his fingers around the steering wheel. “How was your day?”

“It was…mostly fine. I didn’t sleep much last night, so I’ve felt a little off, I guess.”

“Do you normally have trouble sleeping?”

“Sometimes, but no, not usually. I had a lot on my mind, I guess.”

“You aren’t worried about this weekend, are you?”

“No, it wasn’t that.” She hesitates but decides to tell him. “Finn and I got into a fight. I mean, we sorted it out, and we’re okay now, but…you know.”

“I’m sorry. Do you want to talk about it?”

Even if she did want to, which she doesn’t, Ben is the one person in the world she definitely could not talk to about it.

“That’s okay. But I appreciate you asking.”

Ben nods and doesn’t wait long before asking, “Your day was okay otherwise, though?”

“Yeah, it was. I got a lot of work done, Poe tried to convince me that your mother was going to turn into a different person all of a sudden because we’re dating—or, well, she _thinks_ we’re dating, I mean. Oh! Your mother! We were supposed to let her know when we left my place.”

“We were?”

“She asked me to make sure one of us texted her and I totally forgot.” She pulls her phone out of her purse and fires off a text to Leia. She notices one from Finn telling her to travel safely and to call if she needs to talk, so she replies to him too.

“She wanted to make sure that dinner would be ready when we got there, I think. They left earlier this afternoon, but it seemed really important to her that we all have dinner together.”

“Really?” Ben asks. His voice is curious but muted like he’s trying not to show it.

“She’s so excited about this weekend. I think it means a lot to her that you agreed to come.”

“ _We_ agreed,” he corrects. “But that’s good. I’m happy that she’s happy about it. I’ve actually been kind of excited about it myself.”

“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

He doesn’t answer her question, not rising to her teasing, but he does smirk at her, and she delights in it.

Rey is relieved that Ben doesn’t ask anything more about her conversation with Leia. Instead, he asks if she wants to put some music on, showing her how to connect her phone to his car’s stereo system and giving her free reign.

In an effort to find something fairly middle-of-the-road, she settles on a premade playlist that professes itself to be perfect for autumn drives. It makes for noninvasive background music, and they chat quietly overtop of it for the most part anyway.

They’ve been on the Southern State Parkway for about half an hour when Ben tells her he needs to stop for gas. They quickly find an exit and pull off, Ben navigating them into the parking lot and up to one of the eight pumps, only two others of which are occupied.

“Do you want to stay here or you wanna—?” he gestures toward the building without looking at it.

“I’ll come in. We’ve still got quite a way to go, so I should probably go pee while I have the chance.” She says it without thinking anything of it, but Ben releases a muffled little snort, and it makes Rey suddenly aware that he may not feel comfortable with so much candor since they’ve known each other for only a week.

She’s just about to apologize for her mouth getting ahead of her brain when he unbuckles his seatbelt and tells her, “You know, we can stop whenever you want to. It’s not like we’re in that big a rush or anything.”

They’re both out of the car, looking at one another over the top of it when she fixes him with a pointed stare and says, “I think your mother would disagree. She’s expecting us for dinner at 7:30, remember?”

Ben squints, smirking at her. “Yeah, I stand by my original statement.”

“You’re terrible, do you know that?” she asks him, rounding the front of the car.

He doesn’t answer her beyond an amused hum. He opens the door and gestures her in in front of him. Rey heads for the restroom without paying him much mind. She takes care of her business, washes her hands, checks her hair, and heads back out into the store. Ben is not hard to spot over the short shelves holding various tourist-trap souvenirs, foodstuffs, and further over—where she sees him—candy.

As she walks up behind him, he’s mulling over the selection of chocolate bars and other snacks. He’s already holding two bottles of water and small package that she can’t see beyond the color of the wrapper, engulfed as it is in his large hand.

“Seen something you like?” she asks, causing him to jump slightly before he composes himself, and turns fully to her, his empty hand lifting and settling lightly over the small of her back.

“Actually, I was trying to find something you would like.”

“You were going to buy me candy?” she grins up at him. He nods, and turns back to the shelf, maintaining his loose hold on her. “You don’t have to do that, you know.”

“Now what kind of boyfriend would I be if I didn’t?”

“The normal kind?” she teases.

“Sounds like the men you’ve dated were assholes.”

There’s something hard in his voice as he says it, like there’s frustration bubbling just under the surface of his calm exterior.

It’s one fluid movement as Rey rocks up on her toes, pecks a kiss to his cheek, and scoops up a Twix bar. She starts leading him by the hand to the register, her smile entirely audible when she says, “Well, I guess it’s a good thing I’ve got you then.”

She doesn’t look back, doesn’t look at him when they reach the register, though she can feel his eyes flicking between her and the bored employee behind the counter as he pays for their junk food and the tank of gas he’s about to pump. She reaches up and takes the bag their purchases have been packed into, heading for the door with Ben just behind her. Although she’s in front of him, he uses the vantage of his long arms to reach around and push the door open for her, and she glances over her shoulder just enough to say thank you. Ben unlocks the car for her, and she climbs in with the bag in tow, pulling the water bottles out to put them into cupholders she can’t seem to find. She drops her chocolate bar into her lap and pulls the remaining item out of the plastic.

Rey is sort of stupidly charmed to see a package of strawberry Twizzlers in her hand. Ben does not strike her as the kind of guy to eat candy of any sort, but there’s something especially whimsical about the newly acquired knowledge that given the choice of at least fifty different things, Ben picked _Twizzlers_.

She’s still giggling to herself about it when he opens the door and folds his long limbs back behind the wheel. He’s barely done fastening his seatbelt and turning over the ignition, but Rey can’t wait to ask him.

“So, Twizzlers, huh?”

Ben rolls his lips, his jaw working, and he won’t make eye contact with her, but when he answers her, he gives as good as he’s getting. “Don’t tell me you’re a Red Vines girl,” he says, affecting distress, “because this fake-relationship might have to come to a very real end if that’s the case.”

She chuckles, delighted by his playfulness. “Truth be told, I’m not sure I’ve ever had either one.”

“Truth be told, I’m not sure that’s better,” he cries, still trying to sound aghast. He steers them back out onto the highway and then asks her if she minds to open the package for him, which she readily does, holding it up so he can pull one out. Immediately, he bites off nearly half of one of the long red strips, and as he chews, he holds the remaining bit of the candy out for Rey to sample it.

She looks at him from the corner of her eye and smirks. Without meaning to, he’s given her a golden opportunity to push his buttons, and while she knows it will almost definitely be better in theory than actual execution, Rey simply cannot resist. Instead of plucking the candy from between his fingers like she’s sure he intended, she wraps her fingers around his hand, tilting the gummy product until she can pull it between her teeth, brushing his fingers with her lips as she does so.

His breath catches, and he growls a quiet, “Rey,” as she releases his hand and chews thoughtfully, doing a bad job of fending off her smug grin.

Rey swallows the candy. “Pretty good,” she tells him. “Sweeter than I thought it would be.”

A part of her hopes he realizes she’s not just talking about the Twizzler. He looks over at her and watches her carefully for as long as he dares before turning his gaze back to the road.

They eat their candy in relative silence from then on, Ben polishing off the entire package of Twizzlers, apart from the one that Rey steals from him. In trade, she gives him a bite of her chocolate, popping it into his open mouth so that he doesn’t have to take his eyes off of traffic or his hands off the wheel.

With the soft music she’d resumed playing, the steadily dimming sun, her pleasant fullness, and the continuous hum of the road, it’s not long before Rey dozes off, her head drooping to the side, her pale, freckled cheek not quite laying against her left shoulder.

It takes a few moments of steady breathing before Ben even realizes, sneaking a glance at her and smiling at her relaxed expression, the way her lips have dropped open a fraction, the way her eyelashes fan over the top of her cheekbones.

He’s not in a position to watch her the way he would like to—though he thinks it’s probably just as well that he can’t. Even knowing that it’s likely the result of the previous night’s lack of sleep catching up to her, there’s something about knowing she’s comfortable enough to let herself be vulnerable with him this way that makes Ben inhale sharply, drawing in and releasing the same breath in long drafts.

He drives through the last of daylight, the sun really beginning to dip out of view just as he gets takes his exit off the highway. It’s somewhat strange to be back in this part of the world after so many years away. It’s like a nostalgic kind of déjà vu. Ben remembers how delighted he had been to come to Luke’s cabin as a kid. He’d spent whole seasons swimming and fishing and reading by firelight and sledding in this place, and as much of a divide as there is now between he and his uncle, Luke had done so much for him when he’d been a little kid who never quite felt like he fit in with anyone his own age. It seems Ben can’t quite let go of that part of his uncle. He isn’t sure he wants to.

The town the cabin dwells on the edge of has changed somewhat, but not half as much as Ben might have expected, given the amount of time that’s passed. They pass his mother’s favorite restaurant in town, the family bakery that serves the best pumpkin muffins Ben has ever had in his life, the bike shop where he worked for one summer when he was fifteen. Ben considers waking Rey up to show her all of these things, but he figures they’ll have time in the next couple of days. For the briefest flicker of a second, he thinks there might even be time beyond that, maybe even future trips…

Rote memory kicks in as Ben drives them the last few miles to the cabin, settled in the trees at the end of a long gravel driveway. He can’t see the water as he drives up to the house, but he knows it’s there, can picture the view as clearly as he could have ten years before. Either the noise or jostling stirs Rey, who sits up with bleary eyes and a quiet, high-pitched squeak as she arches her back to stretch the muscles that have spent too long slumped against the leather interior.

“I’m sorry I fell asleep,” she says, her voice quiet and a little cloudy.

“Don’t be. I’m glad you got some rest.”

“After this dinner, I’m sure I’ll be glad I did too,” she jokes, and they both laugh.

It’s with these wide smiles on their faces that Leia first sees them while she watches Ben park the car from her vantage point leaning on the front porch railing. As much as she loves each of them on their own, the notion of them together makes her happier than she thinks she has any right to be. It’s hard not to get ahead of herself when she sees them together, both looking happy in a way that nothing else seems to make them.

They pile out of the car, Ben immediately heading to pull their bags from the trunk while Leia darts down off the porch and wraps Rey in an enthusiastic hug, as if she hadn’t seen the girl only hours before. Ben approaches just in time to hear Leia saying, “I’m so glad you’re both here! Dinner should be ready any minute now. I don’t know what it is because they drove me out of the kitchen,” she huffs as they ascend the porch stairs, “but I do know where Luke keeps the good wine!”

Rey laughs, and Ben watches the two of them together. It’s easy, the camaraderie between them, but where it might once have made him feel envious, he finds it just makes him happy to see them both smiling as they are now.

“Are they here?” Han calls from the kitchen, “Or did you just polish off the bottle?”

Ben and Rey share silent smirks while Leia scolds her husband playfully and informs him that yes, their son and their favorite young woman have arrived.

“Are we staying upstairs, mom?” Ben asks, lifting both of his hands a few inches to draw attention the bags he’s carrying.

“Mmhmm,” Leia replies. “Why don’t you take Rey up and drop your things off, and I’ll try to make sure they’re done in there when you come back down.”

“It needs ten more minutes!” Luke shouts.

Han hollers a faintly frustrated, “It does not! It’ll be done in five!”

“Good grief.” Leia rolls her eyes long-sufferingly, settling them on Rey and confiding, “Forty-something years later, you’d think they were the old married couple.”

“We heard that!” The two men call from the kitchen in unison.

Leia’s reply comes in a sing-song as she walks into the kitchen, “You were supposed to!”

Ben nods his head toward the staircase, and Rey takes the initiative to head up in front of him. He tells her it’s the door straight in ahead of them and she moves toward it, opening the door and flipping the light switch. As Ben sits their bags down, Rey takes in the neutral colors of the room, the large bed extending from the middle of the right wall to the middle of the floor. There’s a closet, a couple of nightstands with matching lamps on either side of the bed, and a large bay window with a gorgeous view directly opposite the door. Rey gravitates to it immediately, though it’s dark enough out now that she can’t see much.

“There’s a pretty great view of the water from here in the mornings. It’s far enough that you can see a lot of the beach and stuff.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” she grins at him over her shoulder.

Ben sits on the edge of the bed, falling onto his back when Rey turns to look at him. “You think they’ll notice if we just don’t come back down?”

Rey smiles fondly at him, rounding the bed to the opposite side and sitting with legs hanging over the edge in front of her. Ben is so tall that leaned back as he is on the bed, his head rests right next to her hip.

“Mmm, yes, I think they just might. Besides, I’m starving.” Rey turns the upper part of her body to face him and rests her right hand in the middle of his chest. “And before you even say anything, no way am I going down alone.” Ben at least has the grace to look a little guilty as she smiles down at him. She pats his chest and says, “Come on, love. The longer we make them wait, the more time they’ll have to come up with inappropriate jokes and mildly invasive questions.”

“Oh god,” Ben groans, lamenting the loss of Rey’s hand on him as she stands from the bed. “How the hell did she talk us into this?”

“Oh, come on, Benny, it won’t be that bad.”

He rolls his eyes upward as he stays flat on his back, watching as she purses her lips to fend off a smile with her hands on her hips.

“That’s gonna be a _thing_ with you now, isn’t it?”

“Maaaayyyyybe.” Rey decides as she looks down at him that maybe a little enticement is in order. She leans over, planting her palms on either side of his head, lowering her upper body until she can press her lips to his forehead. She hears him sigh and draws back quickly, standing back to her full height. “You have until I get back from the bathroom to be vertical, Ben. Which is where, by the way?”

“Back into the hallway and to the left.”

“Thank you,” she says, and heads for the door, closing it carefully behind her.

Ben stays where he is on the bed for another minute or so, reminding himself that whatever this is between them is not what he wishes it were. With an enormous sigh, he heaves himself up off the bed, straightening his clothes. He runs a hand through his hair and takes a deep breath. Rey is just stepping out of the bathroom as Ben opens the door again and walks into the hallway.

She smiles at him, and even that small gesture is enough to make his brain echo with a repeated reminder: _she’s not really yours_.

“You ready?” she asks, extending her hand to him. He takes it, and he can’t help thinking that it’s a pretty apt analogy, actually—Ben can’t think of a scenario when he wouldn’t take any piece of her she offered him.

\--

Once they’re downstairs with his parents and Luke, Ben’s thoughts clear somewhat. It’s easy to take his mind off his mounting attraction to Rey when his mother is talking a mile a minute and his father produces a seemingly endless array of serving dishes full of food.

They’ve all loaded their plates and taken seats around Luke’s weathered oak table when Leia starts in on the questions. She wants to hear all about how they met, so Rey quickly jumps in to answer, giving a slightly modified account of how they’d actually met the night of Leia’s party. Because his family already knows Rey, there’s none of the normal “getting to know you” questions. Instead, Leia asks Rey where Ben took her on their first date, if he’s cooked for her yet, if this is the first time they’ve traveled together. In turn, she asks Ben if he’s been working less since he started seeing Rey, which briefly pivots the conversation to Ben’s job and the work he’s been doing since moving back to New York. Though Luke is still a little hesitant to address Ben, he looks genuinely interested in Ben’s job, noticeably enough that Rey reaches over and squeezes Ben’s hand fleetingly.

Han talks to Rey about the garage, and he looks delighted when Ben asks if he’s still working on the same car as he was when Ben left for college. Ben couldn’t count the number of times that Han and Chewie had built and rebuilt the 1967 Ford Falcon, and it seems the tradition has continued because Rey groans next to him, warning Ben not to get Han started on the topic. At his curious look, Han cheerfully informs him that he had enlisted Rey’s help on it the summer before; over Rey’s protests, Han tells a story about the car spraying oil into Rey’s face—including her open mouth—thus beginning the hostility between the girl and the vehicle.

Rey pouts at him, affronted by Ben’s amusement. He lifts his arms over her shoulder, dragging her close enough that he can press his lips against her hairline, though he’s laughing quietly the whole time. She playfully pushes him away, and he’s not even thinking about putting on a good show for his family when he laughs, placating her with a sweet, “I’m sorry, baby, but you’ve got to admit that’s quite a visual.”

Rey continues to huff, Ben continues to laugh, and on his other side, Han leans in and unsubtly tells Ben that he’s got pictures at home. When he turns his head to smile at his father, he catches a look on Han’s face that he can’t remember seeing since he was a kid. Han looks positively cheerful, which is unusual enough, but it’s more than that. He looks _proud_. It makes Ben freeze for a moment, and suddenly, he finds himself swallowing around a lump in his throat.

Rey bumps her shoulder against his bicep, fixing him with a soft stare and whispering, “You okay?”

Ben offers a flimsy smile in return, and nods. She’s still close enough to touch, so he takes her hand and lifts it to his mouth. As he returns it to the table, he tips his head down to bury his nose in her hair.

The three others’ eyes drift between each other and the couple. Leia’s gone a bit misty; Han’s smirk has a particularly pleased tilt to it; even Luke softens slightly at the sight. It only lasts a moment before Ben and Rey remember their audience and extricate themselves from one another.

Leia doesn’t even pretend to be quiet as she leans toward Rey and says, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this happy.”

It makes both Ben and Rey blush, and when he risks a glance at her, she’s smiling minutely down at the table. The rest of the meal passes with casual conversation that’s surprisingly easy, and even more surprisingly pleasant. Han enlists Ben to help him clear the plates and put the leftovers into Tupperware containers that Luke has had since Ben’s childhood. As he’s leaving the dining room with the last of the food, he just manages to overhear Leia asking Rey if they’ve thought about moving in together. He feels a little guilty about leaving her alone to bear the brunt of that particular conversation, but not guilty enough to turn around and intervene. Besides, he knows that Rey has had more than her share of practice fending off his mother. After all, if she hadn’t been so good at dodging Leia’s attempts to set her up, they almost certainly wouldn’t be here now.

As it turns out, Ben doesn’t fare much better himself. As soon as they’re behind the relative privacy of the open doorway, Han starts in on him.

“Listen, kid, I know you’re an adult and it’s not really any of my business, but I gotta ask. You serious about her?”

It catches him off guard.

“I—” he doesn’t know how to answer, he realizes. He knows he’ll have to, and quickly, but Ben hasn’t a clue what he should say to his father who is standing there looking expectantly at him. “It’s only been a couple of months, dad,” he finally voices.

It doesn’t really feel like an answer, and it must not to Han either, because he just cocks a sharp eyebrow at Ben and says, “Look, I’m not saying you’ve got to have all the answers today, but do me a favor and think about it, okay? Nothing’s written in stone, I know that,” he hedges, palms raised so Ben can see the lines and calluses bisecting them, “but Rey means a lot to your mom, kid. And she just got you back. I’m not saying you shouldn’t date her—hell, you and I both know I couldn’t possibly pick anybody better to have as a daughter-in-law, but if you don’t think it’s going to go anywhere, well… I don’t want your mother to get attached to the idea of it is all, not if you don’t plan to hold onto her. I don’t want her to feel like she has to choose between you.”

Ben is more than half convinced that his father is about to say something along the lines of _because it would be too hard for her to give you up again_ , but instead he says, “Rey doesn’t deserve that. She doesn’t deserve to feel like another family didn’t want her just because the two of you decided not to stay together.”

And maybe it shouldn’t surprise Ben, that his parents would choose him over this girl who they both so clearly adore, but it does. His chest aches a little at the realization.

It occurs to him then for the very first time that he and Rey, in all of their many conversations, have never so much as mentioned an exit strategy for this whole thing. Ben knows he hasn’t brought it up—and probably won’t ever be the one to bring it up—because he is in no hurry to get rid of Rey. She is nothing like he expected her to be when he watched her walk into that bar—she’s better. It’s much too soon to even contemplate something like permanence with her, but he knows with all certainty that he’s unlikely to meet anyone else who makes him feel, for the first time in years, like it’s even something he wants for himself.

Ben nods wordlessly at his dad, both incapable of and unwilling to say anything more about it. Han nods back, just once, and then turns to the cabinets and starts pulling out containers for the leftovers.

\--

They spend a couple more hours with the rest of his family, having dessert and then scotch. Leia insists on pulling out a deck of cards afterward over the protests of all three men. Ben thinks Rey doesn’t look especially eager either, but she doesn’t object vocally like the rest of them.

They play a couple hands of poker, and when it becomes clear that Luke, Leia, and Ben are all absolutely abysmal at it, much to Han’s disappointment, they switch to rummy. Rey is less familiar with the rules of this game, so Ben pulls her chair close to his and keeps an arm around her while he talks her through the first couple of rounds.

It’s possible that he’s a little tipsier than he meant to be, or maybe it’s just that he’s spent a significant portion of his evening—and the past week, if he’s being honest—thinking about Rey and the many things she makes him feel. Without fanfare, Ben lets the thought settle into his mind that he wants to be with Rey—not hypothetically, not as her pretend boyfriend; he wants to date her for real. Embracing that fact makes him a little bit brazen apparently, because he takes every opportunity he finds throughout the evening to sneak kisses onto her cheeks, her forehead, her hair, her hands, and once, the tip of her nose. He gets dangerously close to her mouth more than once, and god, it’s beyond tempting, but while they had discussed the possibility of PDA beforehand, he wants to kiss her properly, preferably without any of his immediate family watching them.

Eventually Han decides he’s had enough of them all and declares he’s going to bed. Leia follows him right away, blowing a kiss at Ben and Rey as she heads for the hallway that leads to the ground-floor bedroom she and Han always use. Luke follows after her to his own bedroom only a few minutes later after he’s made himself a mug of tea that Ben knows he will drink no more than half of before falling asleep with the remainder cooling on the nightstand next to him.

And then they’re alone.

Ben briefly contemplates asking Rey if she wants to watch a movie or something, but he sees her stifling a yawn into her shoulder. He’s sure he must be smiling in a soft and dopey sort of way when he asks her if she’d like to go to bed. She nods at him, and he notices that her eyes seem to have grown a little dimmer since the family party broke up. He clears up the glasses, puts away the cards, checks that the doors are locked, and the lights are off. When he’s done, he finds her standing at the foot of the stairs waiting for him. This, too, makes him smile.

She heads up the stairs a step or two in front of him, and while Ben is thoroughly appreciating the view, he can’t keep his mind from straying to what awaits him upstairs.

As they make it to the bedroom, all of the easiness of the evening evaporates. Ben is hyperaware of the lack of space, the way it will shrink further when they’re in bed together. Because he’s at a point where he can admit to himself that he wants to take Rey to bed— _desperately_ , even—but he doesn’t think that’s what she wants, and knowing that he will spend the next several hours inches away from her body, that they’ll both be so vulnerable to one another like this, well, it sets him more than a little on edge.

He tunes back in to find Rey kneeling next to her bag, sifting through to find her pajamas and some toiletries. He’s still watching when she stands and turns to find him looking, gesturing to the door with her full hands and a tilt of her head, which he acknowledges with a silent nod.

He takes the opportunity to change out of his own clothes and into some red and black plaid flannel pants and a plain black t-shirt. He folds the clothes he’s discarded and stacks them neatly next to his bag. Ben scrubs a hand through his hair, down over his face, around the back of his neck. He’s feeling antsy and uncertain, and he knows that there’s next to no chance that Rey won’t recognize it right away when she comes back.

He fishes out his toothbrush and other toiletries, sitting on the edge of the bed with them in his lap while he waits for his turn in the bathroom. When Rey comes back in only a moment later, Ben jumps up as if she’s caught him doing something he isn’t supposed to, rather than sitting quietly, consumed by his thoughts.

She mutters a quiet, “Hey,” and Ben barely spares a glance in her direction before he throws his full hand in a vague gesture and basically sprints for the door.

When he comes back in just a few minutes later, it’s to find Rey sitting on the bed in an oversized college t-shirt and a pair of cotton shorts that show off entirely too much of her toned legs which are kicked out in front of her and crossed at the ankle. Her back is propped against the pillows wedged up by the old wooden headboard. Ben hadn’t taken the chance to look at her before, but he finds now that he’s capable of very little else. He’d left his things in the bathroom, so there’s nothing for him to do but join her, which he both badly wants and doesn’t feel quite ready to do.

“Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to come to bed?”

She sounds a little subdued, but still playful and teasing, and Ben can hardly handle the sudden flood of wanting that hits him head-on. He inhales deeply and moves until he’s sitting diagonally across from her, his bare feet toward the pillows, his back held stiff and straight at the bottom of the bed.

“Ben, are you—does this make you uncomfortable? I can go sleep on the couch or something, I don’t mind. We’ll pretend we had a fight, or—”

“Rey, no. I’m fine. Don’t go downstairs. I mean, unless you want to.”

“I don’t,” she whispers.

“Good.”

“I would like it if you’d tell me what’s got you all wound up, though.” She cocks an eyebrow at him, and it’s a kind of reflex for Ben to drop his gaze to his lap where his fingers are twisting together tightly enough that his knuckles have turned white.

Ben’s words are gritted from between his clenched teeth. “It’s nothing, really.”

Rey fixes her eyes on him, her countenance unimpressed. “Ben, if you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to, but please don’t lie to me, okay? We haven’t lied to each other so far, and I don’t want to start now. We’re lying to enough people as it is. Please.”

Ben nods but says nothing. He can’t help wondering how she’d feel about knowing he is keeping something so big from her.

He stands, steps up toward the top of the bed and starts folding the covers on his side down. He has moved on to adjusting the pillows needlessly when she asks, “Are you sure you’re okay?” She’s watching him carefully, so it’s all too easy to catch her eye.

“I’m okay. I just… There’s a lot on my mind, I guess.”

Rey nods sympathetically. She doesn’t get up from the bed, instead opting to lift her butt and grab the covers out from under her. She does an adorably awkward little backward bounce maneuver, and it enables her to slip her legs under the blankets. It makes Ben smile, makes his head feel clearer for a moment.

There are things he still needs to figure out, decisions he will have to make, but he realizes watching her that if he allows himself to miss out on the time he does have with her because he isn’t sure whether he’ll be allowed to have more, it will be his own fault, and he’ll prove himself once and for all as a damned fool.

He turns on the lamp on the nightstand next to his side of the bed before he treks over to flip the lightswitch next to the door. Rey is wiggling her way down between the covers when he reaches the bed again, and he smiles faintly while following suit.

“Do you need the light?” he asks her, and Rey shakes her head no without lifting it from the pillow. He can see the way her eyes have grown even heavier since they came upstairs; even with the nap she’d taken in the car, it’s been a long day at the end of an even longer week. He turns the lamp back off and lays down fully, flat on his back.

The bed, old as it is, doesn’t creak and groan too badly as they—mostly Rey—squirm around and settle in. The room is almost entirely dark, apart from the faint glow of the moon through the window that looks over the water. They’re high enough on the second floor that the trees don’t block the light quite so much as they do when standing outside beneath them.

Whether or not the lack of general visibility has anything to do with it, Ben doesn’t see it coming at all when Rey slides her bare feet over to his side of the bed, pressing frozen toes to his covered shins. He whips his head in her direction, all wide eyes and gasping mouth, and even though they can hardly see each other, he’s pretty sure she’s smiling slyly back at him.

“Jesus, Rey, your feet are so fucking cold!”

“They almost always are,” she giggles.

“Well, do you want some socks, crazy lady?”

She asks with perfect sincerity, “Why would I need socks?”

“Um, because your toes are cold enough that I’m a little worried about you getting frostbite?”

It makes her laugh more, though she stifles it by pulling the thick comforter up over her mouth.

“No, I mean, why would I need socks when I can just make you get them warm this way?”

“Oh-ho,” he crows, trying to be at least sort of quiet about it, “so that’s how you wanna do this, huh?” He rolls to face her, slipping his hands beneath the covers to wrap around her waist, half tickling, half dragging her closer to the center of the bed. She squeals and squirms, and he laughs and keeps tormenting her.

It takes them a few minutes to get themselves together again, and when they do, they’re pressed together down most of the length of their bodies, limbs tucked into free spaces, her toes wedged firmly between his ankles where his pantlegs have slightly risen up. Ben tucks one arm under his pillows, the other resting loosely around her waist. Rey’s hands are palm-flat, divided between Ben’s muscled chest and his slim hip. She tips her head forward until her forehead lays against his collarbone. They’re both breathing a little heavy, still coming down from their impromptu wrestling match.

Eventually, she asks him in a whisper, “Is this okay?”

Ben breathes steadily, in and out, and risks pressing one more kiss to the top of her head. With his mouth still brushing against her hair, he answers her: “Perfect.”

Hours later, Rey will wake to find herself wrapped around his larger form, her face buried in the fabric of his t-shirt stretched over his muscled back. She will feel the way his left hand is holding hers where she has thrown her arm over his waist. Her left leg will be slipped between both of his. Her feet will be perfectly warm.


	8. A Little Couldn't Hurt...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Saturday, Part One.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a soft marshmallow baby, apparently, so this story is just going to be fluffy af I guess. Consider yourselves warned. Also there is a line in this chapter that I have shamelessly hijacked from one of Adam's movies (he's not the one who says it, in either case), and I'm not even sort of sorry about it. *shrugs*
> 
> In other news, these two keep really messing up my outline for this fic, so I've been replotting some of what I had previously planned. All that to say: that chapter count is almost definitely going to change, but I have no idea how much or in what direction. Because I'm mad with power and also apparently kinda flighty.
> 
> Anyway, enjoy! Next update coming super soon, for those of you who haven't been following my editing saga on Twitter.

It’s something of a surprise for Rey to wake up and realize that she has effectively twined herself around Ben Solo. For one thing, he’s at least twice her size—his hips alone, narrow as they are, still sit nearly six inches higher than her own as they both lay on their sides.

Then again, it’s not such a very big surprise after all. It’s not as if she hasn’t spent a good chunk of her waking hours lately thinking of doing pretty much the same thing. And after the evening they had spent with his parents and uncle the night before—after the brazen flirting and easy touches and the hundred times his lips had touched her all too fleetingly—well, Rey’s honestly a little surprised she hasn’t done something embarrassing for both of them, like shove her hand down his pants.

It’s not that she wants to move. Truthfully, Rey is in no hurry to let go of this moment or this man, but her bladder is prodding at her consciousness with increasing vigor, and as much as it would simplify things, something tells her that clinging to him like a koala is maybe not the best way to go about bringing her shifting feelings up with Ben. She tries to move slowly as she extricates herself from him. Her motions are slow to the point of being comical, and she’s determined to keep the blankets in place as much as possible because she can already feel that the air in the room around them is significantly colder than the heat produced by their bodies in close proximity.

When she finally makes it out of the bed, she’s close to shivering already, but Ben seems to still be sleeping soundly, so she isn’t too bothered about the cold. She tiptoes to the door and opens it as quietly as possible, careful to move slowly enough that it doesn’t creak where she can prevent it. She thinks she hears someone moving around downstairs, but she has no idea what time it is or what the sleeping habits of any of the Solo/Skywalker clan are like, so she keeps tiptoeing as she steps out into the hallway, leaving the door to the bedroom barely cracked so that the latch won’t make a sound behind her. She ducks into the bathroom she’d used the night before and relieves herself. She brushes her teeth and splashes water on her face while she’s there. Everything else can wait, she figures.

Rey makes her way back to the bedroom, figuring she should at least put on some actual pants instead of the short cotton shorts she’d slept in the night before. She plucks a pair of jeans from her bag first, and then decides she may as well go ahead and get dressed for the day. She pulls out one of her favorite sweaters, a thick pair of socks, and a clean pair of underwear. As she’s rooting around for a bra, her hand makes contact with something thin and semi-slick. It only takes her a moment to realize what it is, and then she’s embarrassed all over again at her foolish presumption of packing lingerie for a trip where they were one floor above Ben’s family. She can feel herself blushing; it’s a relief that Ben is still sleeping, breathing loudly but not quite snoring behind her. She rolls her eyes at herself and drops the black lace back into the bag, sifting around fruitlessly. She decides that no one will be able to tell she’s not wearing a bra anyway, as thick as her sweater is, so she drops the lid of her suitcase and gathers her clothes. Before she heads back to the bathroom to shower, she risks another glance at Ben.

He’s big enough to take up most of the queen-sized bed on his own. He lays facing her, his eyes shut, dark lashes fanning out over sharp cheekbones. She studies the patternless design on his skin, his prominent features, his stubble. Ben’s masculine face is in such contrast right now to the way he’s sleeping with his lips slightly parted and the blankets pulled up to his chin, curled in on himself without her warmth to bolster his own, hair sprawled haplessly in inky waves over the crisp white pillowcase.

Turnabout being fair play and all that, Rey detours the few steps to his side of the bed, leaning down until she can place the faintest of kisses against his skin at the corner of his eyebrow. He sighs and Rey thinks at first that’s she’s woken him up, and she spends a brief moment panicking about how to explain herself, as if he would even ask her to. He doesn’t wake though, merely shifts around under the sheets until he’s comfortable again and settles back to rest without ever opening his eyes. She suspects that Ben Solo is not the sort of man who lets himself sleep in, even on the weekends, and it delights her more than a little to see him laying there so contently now.

Still, while he’s quite a sight to take in at all hours of the day, Rey can’t spend her morning standing there gawking at him and holding her clothes. She tiptoes back out the door and into the bathroom again, showers efficiently and dresses quickly. When she’s dressed, she’s tempted to go back to the bedroom, to spend another few minutes gazing her fill at Ben’s sleeping form under the guise of returning her pajamas to her bag. She’s _too_ tempted, really, and her self-control could use a little fortification before she has to spend the rest of her day teetering on the line of looking at Ben like an adoring girlfriend for the sake of his family and _not_ looking at him that way because she’s come to realize just how easy it is to do so. If this were real, Rey knows, she just knows, that she would have no choice but to moon over him constantly, despite not being the type of girl who does things like moon over pretty boys. In so many ways, and in such a short time, Ben Solo has well and truly established himself in her life as the exception to so very many of Rey’s rules.

\--

For once, when Ben wakes, it’s not to the shrill sound of an alarm chasing him out of bed at dawn. Instead, he wakes to sunbeams drifting through the thin curtains and the distant sound of water. The house is quiet and although he doesn’t know what time it is, he knows he’s not the first one up. There is no lithe body lying next to his own, no shared heat, no bleary eyes or messy bedhead. A problematically large part of him is internally bemoaning the lack of Rey in the bed with him, but at the very least, it gives him good reason not to linger the way he would have liked to, were she beside him now.

With a quick stop off at the bathroom, Ben heads downstairs. The ancient clock Luke keeps tells him it’s nearly nine, which is so much later than he normally sleeps that he’s a little surprised he hadn’t roused earlier.

It’s still quiet even once he’s downstairs where he expects the rest of his family to be. Han is sitting at the kitchen table sipping coffee from an old mug sloppily made and painted by a ten-year-old Ben in art class as a gift for his uncle. He’s reading the paper with the glasses he pretends he doesn’t need perched on the end of his nose.

“Morning,” Han mumbles gruffly and without looking up.

“Morning, Dad,” Ben answers, stifling a yawn into his shoulder. “Where is—?”

“Your girl?”

 _Oh_. Ben likes that. He likes that _a lot_. He’s never considered himself a particularly possessive person, but then he’s never really had anyone he wanted to be selfish about, not since he’d been a kid trailing desperately after his parents. But it’s becoming a pattern, the way Rey keeps teaching him things he didn’t know about himself. The smug, jealous thing in his chest revels in his father’s acknowledgement of Rey as his—his to have, his to own and claim and keep. _His_.

He rounds the kitchen counter so he’s out of sight as he adjusts his newly-interested dick in his pajama pants. “I was going to say ‘everybody.’” He pauses and then mutters, “But yes.”

Han still doesn’t look up, but he chuckles knowingly and tosses his head in the direction of the French doors that lead to the deck built onto the back of the house. “Your mom took her out for a walk. Something about the water and the cold air; I don’t know, kid, I wasn’t really listening. Anyway, she’s outside.”

Ben nods even though Han is paying him no attention. He pours himself a cup of coffee and circles the counter once more until he’s standing in front of the deck doors. He tries to peer through the glass to spot _his girl_ , but there are too many trees obstructing his view. Instead, he heads opens the door and steps out into the damp air. There’s a slight layer of fog rolling in off the water; it feels like fall here in a way it never could in the city. As he sips his coffee the contrast strikes him, and he realizes that he’s still barefoot and wearing short sleeves. He should go inside and get dressed, he knows, but as he moseys from one side of the deck to the other, he’s surprisingly content to stand in his pajamas in the cold and pretend he isn’t trying to spot the women in his life.

He sips his coffee, but he’s shivering enough that he’s ready to abandon his search. They’ll be back soon enough. It’s pure coincidence that he’s just about to head back inside when he catches the sound of his mother’s voice. There’s no time for him to cross the deck and get back into the kitchen before the pair of women are mounting the stairs, so instead he’s just standing awkwardly next to the railing, holding his mug close to his face and doing a very bad job of looking nonchalant.

He catches Rey’s eye as soon as her face comes into view, but it is— _of course_ —Leia that addresses him first.

“Benny,” she grins, “I see you’ve finally decided to join the land of the living.” He nods, swallows another mouthful of coffee. When she’s close enough to reach him, Leia lifts a hand and tugs lightly at his earlobe until he bends down enough that she can press a kiss to his temple and fuss over his hair. She’s not normally so affectionate, but the impeccably good mood she’s been in since they arrived last night seems to be bringing it out in her.

“Morning, Mom,” he says quietly. When he looks back to Rey, she’s smiling softly, an affectionate expression of her own, and one Ben is only too eager to be on the receiving end of.

He grins at her over Leia’s head, his cheeks stretching further outward as she laughs at Leia’s outraged, “Why are you barefoot?! Come back inside, idiot.”

Still, Leia doesn’t wait for either of them to follow her. She merely collects the thermos Rey is holding and Ben’s mostly empty mug and carries them into the house.

She’s just pulling the door closed behind her when Rey takes a step closer and greets him. “Morning, love.”

Ben is pretty sure that if his heart doesn’t stop stopping like that, he’s not going to make it through the remainder of the weekend. There are worse ways to go, he thinks privately.

“Good morning, sweetheart.”

Without the burden of his coffee mug, his hands are free to reach out and draw her closer to him, and he takes the opportunity to do just that. She allows him to pull her in until her hands are resting on his cotton-covered chest and hers are wrapped around either of her hips.

“What’s with you?” she grins curiously.

He shrugs but slides his hands around her until they meet and his fingers lace together at the small of her back. “Mom’s probably watching,” he reasons.

“Hmm. And if we were having this conversation while standing a foot apart, she might get suspicious?”

He raises his eyebrows and pins her with a serious expression. “Absolutely.”

“How do you figure?”

“Because any scenario where you’re standing there looking like that and I’m not touching you is just absurd, Rey.”

It is physically impossible for her not to swoon a little bit at his words. She bites her lower lip around a smile, but she holds his eyes.

“No kidding, though.” His tone is solemn, and Rey is glad she only has a moment to feel nervous about what he will say next before he continues. “Did you get more beautiful since last night?”

Yep. Definitely swooning.

“Well,” she drawls, “I don’t know. Did you get more charming?” She reaches up and twines strands of his messy hair around her thin finger.

It’s endearing and so unintentionally sexy that Ben is in serious danger of losing the battle with himself and kissing her for the first time in his pajamas with coffee breath while his mother probably watches them furtively through the kitchen windows.

“You tell me,” he breathes, his eyes flickering between her eyes and her mouth.

“Mmm, I think maybe you did,” she mutters as she dips her head forward so her forehead rests gently against his chin.

He noses at her hair sweetly, breathing in her scent. “Well, if the stunning woman in my arms right now is any indication, I must have.”

“Ohhh, this is so dangerous,” Rey breaths, barely even a whisper. She takes a deep breath and it feels like they’re both on the verge of… _something_.

Naturally, this is the moment when Luke pokes his head out the door and says, “Hey, kids. Breakfast is here.”

Rey holds Ben’s eyes for another long moment before she trails the hand she’s had in his hair over his shoulder, down his arm, until she can catch his fingers in a loose grip, her small hand only managing to wrap fully around the first two. She’s in too much of a fog from their close proximity to even be turned on by the prospect of where else his thick fingers might fit snuggly. She leads him into the house by those two fingers, leads him all the way over to the table where they both take the seats they held at dinner the night before. Leia brings Ben’s mug back to him, refilled, and one for Rey alongside it.

When she and Luke come back, she’s carrying refilled mugs for herself and her husband while Luke is toting a stack of plates and a large mug with marshmallows practically spilling over the sides.

Han puts down his paper, thanks his wife, and cocks an eyebrow at his brother-in-law. “Aren’t you a little old for that much sugar?”

“Han take care of Han,” Luke retorts, unconcerned. He takes his seat and passes the plates around while Leia and Ben open the boxes Luke used to carry back fresh pastries, muffins, and all manner of other desserts pretending to be breakfast. One of the boxes does hold warm sandwiches made on croissants.

As they all sit around divvying up the food, Leia starts telling Rey about the place they’re going for dinner tonight. She wants to take her shopping, she says, not because she needs anything new, but because that’s what mothers do with their son’s girlfriends when they bring them home. She tells her all about the adorable boutiques in town, and Rey says nothing about the fact that even making decent money at Resistance, Manhattan is expensive and she has bills and rent and student loans that keep her on a tight enough budget that she can’t really afford to go drop a couple hundred dollars on a whim, even if that is what mothers do with their son’s girlfriends.

Ben, it seems, is as attuned to her as ever, and he immediately does his best to intervene. Rey doesn’t need to know that it’s as much about his selfish desire to keep her as close as possible for as long as he can as anything else.

“I promised Rey I would take her for a hike,” he says, trying to convey to his mother as nicely as possible that as the (fake) boyfriend, he gets dibs.

Rey straightens a little next to him, and when he lifts an eyebrow at her, she says, “Oh, well, you don’t have to. I mean, we can, uh, we can skip it, if you’d rather.”

Ben wants to take her on a hike, wants to watch her pull her phone out and take dozens of pictures of the views and the trees and the water, wants to see her cheeks pink in the cold while he holds her hand and lets her lead him down trails that are entirely unfamiliar to her. Mostly, he just wants to get her alone, and ultimately, it’s that thought that has him insisting.

“I want to. I mean, if you still want to go, I’d really like to take you.”

She smiles over at him but doesn’t answer. Leia sighs huffily to Rey’s right. She’s not willing to concede her plans entirely, which makes Ben wonder if maybe he should be a little apprehensive about her determination.

“How about we split the difference?” Leia offers, as if she’s striking a business deal. “You two can go for your hike this morning, and then Rey and I will head into town and do some shopping. We’ll come back in time for us to all get cleaned up for dinner. Deal?”

Ben makes a show of rolling his eyes for Rey, for no other reason than he loves that secret little smile she gives him. “It’s really up to Rey, mom.” He turns to the woman sitting next to him and drapes an arm over the back of her chair, bending at the elbow to run the pad of his thumb over the nape of her neck, just where her hairline stops.

Rey sighs at the gentle touch, quickly coming back to herself and hoping that no one else had noticed her brief lapse in composure. “Oh, well, that all sounds fine to me. I’m not picky. I’m just enjoying being out of the city for a weekend.”

“Excellent. That’s settled then. Why don’t you two head out after breakfast, that way Rey can get cleaned up to go shopping; then she can just change when we come back, and she won’t have to shower again.”

“That sounds fine, Leia. Is that okay with you, love?” she turns to Ben, ignoring Leia’s thrilled eyes and Han’s smug grin that result from seeing their son’s immediate acquiescence. Privately, they both suspect that there’s next to nothing Rey could ask of Ben that he would say no to.

Luke watches the whole thing with a façade of pointed indifference, but he watches, nonetheless.

The family finishes their breakfast with idle chatter, the bulk of which Leia unsurprisingly accounts for, and the meal concludes quickly. Ben excuses himself from the table first, kissing the top of Rey’s head as he carries his coffee mug to the kitchen before heading upstairs.

Leia watches his retreat much more closely than Rey or either of the two men remaining at the table. She’s craning her neck to the left to see around the corner, watching him take the stairs two at a time, just because his legs allow it. She stays leaned back in her chair until Ben is out of sight, closing the upstairs bedroom door softly behind him, and then her attention immediately shifts to Rey.

“Honey, I have to tell you,” she starts, a motherly hand extended to lay over Rey’s own where it’s wrapped around the handle of her mug, “I know you two haven’t been together very long, and I’m not saying that you should even be making long-term plans at this point—not that I personally wouldn’t support that one hundred percent, because I absolutely would—but I have to say—I wasn’t sure we would ever get to see him like this.”

Leia’s rambling is a lot to process, especially first thing in the morning, and in between thoughts about how she could possibly have so much energy now given the way Rey has seen her drag herself into the office for early meetings, she manages to ask, very articulately, “What?”

Han grumbles something about _leaving the girl alone, Leia, Jesus_ , but his wife is not to be deterred, demanding Rey’s attention again before she had even managed to shift it fully away from her.

“Ben. He just seems so happy with you. I won’t say I never thought he’d wind up with someone—he’s handsome and rich enough that I have to assume someone would have gotten to him eventually—but I just never really imagined that I’d get the chance to see him so absolutely smitten.”

Rey’s cheeks heat, and apparently her floundering is enough to make even Luke take notice of them all. She eagerly pivots her head toward him on the opposite side of the table from his sister. It’s not that she doesn’t want to talk to Leia about Ben, it’s just that she’s not quite sure how to. How does one talk to their boss who also happens to be the mother of the man they’re pretending to date while simultaneously developing some very real and swiftly-growing feelings for about said man? Her head hurts just thinking of it.

“I’m still not convinced you couldn’t do better,” Luke remarks, and Rey bristles, subdued only by the relief she feels that Ben isn’t there to hear his uncle’s first real comment on their relationship. “But I have to say, Leia’s right; it’s clear the boy has got it bad for you.”

Rey glances back at Leia who is, for the moment, still focused on her brother, sage and smug as she nods at him. Rey’s eyes drift to Han. She doesn’t really expect him to be taking any particular interest in the present conversation—she’s never known him to be especially sentimental about anything, and certainly not about something like his son’s love life. However, when her eyes move in his direction, it’s to find him already looking at her, his gaze steady and studious. It doesn’t exactly put her on edge, but it makes her feel… _something_. Uncertain, maybe. _Guilty_ , her brain supplies. She can’t hold his eyes for more than moment under the weight of it, whatever it is, so she continues her scan of the group, turning back to Luke and clearing her throat so she can reply with a succinct, “Lucky me.”

There’s no trace of sarcasm in her words, the way there might normally be attached to that particular expression. Luke rolls his eyes minutely, lifting his own mug to take a large drink that leaves the hair above his upper lip slightly coated in melted marshmallow foam.

Rey’s eyes flit to Han again, and he’s still watching her, so she determinedly drops her chin to stare at what remains of her breakfast.

“Oh, Luke, get over yourself,” Leia groans. “You could at least try to sound happy for them.”

“Who says I’m not happy for them?”

“Your tone, for one. You just can’t stand to give him any credit, can you?”

“Leia,” Han breathes, and she cuts herself off before the tirade can truly begin. She releases an obviously disgruntled noise before picking up her coffee cup and heading to the kitchen to refill it.

As soon as she’s gone, Han turns on Luke.

“Why do you have to do that? You know as well as I do it’s not going to do anything but piss people off.”

“I’m not doing anything, Han,” Luke replies with affected temperance. “And I agreed with her, in case you missed it.”

“Agreeing with her or not is not the problem. Leia’s right, you ought to give the kid a break. He’s not the twenty-two year old who disappointed you anymore.” Luke looks like he’s going to object, but Han raises a hand and barrels on. “I’m not saying that there aren’t still some issues to be worked out between all of us, but he’s trying, Luke. He brought his girl up here this weekend, and—”

“Oh, please, like that was his idea. I’m sur—”

“It was,” Rey interjects instinctually before she makes up her mind to do so. “It was his idea.”

“It was?” Han asks at the same time Luke says, “Rey, please.”

She doesn’t let him get any further than that. Among the many feelings for Ben mounting in her chest with every breath she takes, apparently there’s a well of protectiveness just waiting for a moment like this.

“Look, I know it isn’t technically any of my business. It was before I knew you all, and long before I knew Ben, but Han is right; he’s trying, Luke. He wanted to come this weekend because he knew how much it would mean to Leia if we did. And while he would never say it to you, I think it means a lot to him too, to be back here after so long. He’s been excited about it all week, actually. And I don’t care if you believe me or not; this isn’t my fight, and I fully admit that. I’ve never heard the story from your side, and as much as I care for all of you, I think it’s safe to say I would be in his corner regardless. All he wants is to feel like you all want him here, and he would hate it if he knew I just said that, but it’s true, and apparently you need to hear it. Ben deserves better than you holding onto a grudge because he was angry at his parents as a teenager and because he didn’t follow the path you wanted for him after college. It doesn’t matter if you approve of all of his choices or not, then or now or ten years from now. What matters is that you are his _family_ —you’re his uncle, Luke—you can’t keep assuming the worst of him. It isn’t fair. Ben is not a perfect person, but he is a _good man_. The very least you could do is try to see that.”

By the time she’s finished her speech, she’s managed to keep her voice down, but she’s standing, gripping the back of her chair until her knuckles look ready to burst with the bones and tendons drawn taut underneath her skin. Rey feels like she’s just delivered that entire rant from somewhere outside her own body, and when she returns to herself, Luke looks surprised, a little scolded, a little defensive. Leia is hovering in the doorway, and the look on her face is one Rey recognizes, at least, sort of. It is akin to the look she always has when she closes a big deal, when she wins a fight at work, but it’s mixed with the more easy-going, affable looks she often sports when she takes her staff out for drinks or when she watches one of them interact seamlessly with their clients.

It’s Han that really floors her, though. If it had been uncertainty that she felt when their eyes met before, it’s gone now, replaced with resolve and pride and something entirely too knowing. She thinks carefully about what she had said to Luke, sifting frantically through her own words to make sure she hadn’t managed to blow their cover in some way. If Rey could see her own face, she would find there a plea for reassurance. Unbeknownst to her, it’s the way she sometimes looks at Leia when they’re at work and she questions whether she’s doing something right, even though she knows she is. It’s not entirely divorced from the expression she wears when she looks for Ben’s confirmation that they’re on the same page about something, though it’s nowhere near that warm, that familiar. Unlike with Ben, Rey feels at a bit of a loss, not sure what to do with herself apart from breathe heavily and try not to waver.

Her eyes are drifting somewhat, but it’s Han and his satisfied countenance that they keep coming back to. As she observes him carefully, he winks at her, nodding fractionally in the direction of the stairs behind her. It’s not a dismissal, but rather a confirmation, a silent, “I’ll take it from here, kid.” Rey must look as apprehensive as she feels, because he nods at her again, and she promptly retreats.

She can barely hear Han and Leia snapping at Luke over her own heavy footfalls as she darts up the stairs and into the bedroom.

Given how long it felt like she stayed downstairs after he left, it strikes Rey as a little odd that Ben is standing shirtless in the middle of the room. In his defense, he does seem to be reaching for his shirt that he’s thrown onto the bed that he apparently made sometime during the morning, though there’s no way to know if he’d done so right after he got up or just now while he was waiting on her. It doesn’t make much sense for her to want to know—it’s not the kind of thing that she would normally care about in the slightest—but she finds that she does. It’s another piece to snap into place as she’s putting together the whole puzzle of Ben Solo, and she’s as eager to have it as she has been any of the others so far.

If the sight before her now is any indication of the picture of him that she’s metaphorically forming, well, it certainly won’t disappoint. There’s nothing especially surprising about the fact that Ben Solo is absurdly hot, and she’s been close enough to him and his toned body to get a sense of just how fit he is, but fuck if she doesn’t stand there with her jaw practically on the hardwood.

Ben, by contrast, seems entirely unbothered. He tugs the fitted tee shirt over his head, this one charcoal gray, and then has the audacity to smile at her with his adorably crooked teeth and freshly ruffled hair. It’s sort of a wonder she’s made it this far through the morning, and if the day keeps on like this, Rey isn’t sure she will last the rest of it. At least, not without doing something rash—like tearing Ben’s shirt back off of him and licking over the subtle lines of his abs or sinking her teeth into the one single trace of fat that lies just under his belly button. 

“Hey,” he says, like he’s completely unaware that her brain is short-circuiting as they speak. “What took you so long?”

She could tell him the truth, and part of her knows that she should, but there’s a larger part of her, a more demanding part, that insists that telling him will do nothing but hurt. What else could come of being reminded of his uncle’s continual undermining of him, or of his mother’s—mistaken, surely—impression that this is the happiest Ben has ever been with a girlfriend. _Fake_ _girlfriend_ , she reminds herself.

“Oh, um, your mum. She, uh, we were just chatting.”

In a maneuver identical to Han, Ben laughs through his nose, shaking his head as he pulls a flannel shirt on over his t-shirt, buttoning it up like he has no idea that Rey is struggling not to be personally offended by every layer he puts between her eyes and his bare torso.

“Classic Leia. She claims you for herself all afternoon and tries to butt in on the few hours she’s graciously conceded my girlfriend to me.”

His voice is so easy, his tone so playful, that Rey’s heart flips a little in her chest. It’s entirely unfair for him to keep calling her his girlfriend so casually, but Ben seems to either not recognize or not care about the danger of getting her attached to the idea.

“Did you want to change or anything?”

Rey shakes her head, relieved at the mundanity of the question. At least this she knows how to navigate. “No, I, uh, just need to grab my hiking boots.” She points to her bags and steps around the bed closer to him, squatting in front of her suitcase. She opens one of the zippered compartments and extracts a pair of boots that are too bulky to be considered at all stylish. She rocks back on her heels and stands; moving to the bed, she sits on the edge and kicks off the boots she had put on before her walk with Leia, the ones she’d come in wearing last night. Though she hasn’t noticed, Ben is watching her, but Rey is only alerted to that fact when she lifts one hiking boot into her lap and begins picking at the laces, at which point his laughter startles her so that she drops the boot back to the floor.

She jerks her head around toward him and tracks his movements as he bends over and picks her boot up, holding it in his hand and looking it over and then offering it to her.

“What are you laughing at?” she asks him, and it’s impossible not to giggle a little herself as she takes her shoe from him and resumes her efforts to untie it and put it on.

“Your shoes are so tiny!”

Rey is full-on laughing now. “What the hell?”

“Your feet must be tiny. Are they tiny?” He cranes his neck and bends at the waist, bobbing around so that he can get a good look at her feet that Rey is doing her best to get into her boots as quickly as possible.

“My feet are normal, thank you very much. I have a very average shoe size, which makes it almost impossible to find shoes on good sales, but also means that you should not be so interested in how big my feet are!”

Ben laughs the entire time she’s talking, and Rey is doing her best not to join him, though she’s mostly failing at it.

“Okay, maybe you have a ‘very average shoe size,’ but come on, you have to admit, they’re still pretty tiny.”

“They’re not tiny! I’m above average height for a woman, so my feet are _at least_ average size!”

“It’s not that that doesn’t make sense,” he reasons, “but, I mean, come on.” Ben moves to sit next to her on the side of the bed. He stretches one leg across hers so that the instep of her left foot lines up with his right. It is, admittedly, pretty comical to see their feet next to one another.

She glances at him, and he’s already looking at her, gloating expression firmly in place, as if he’s well and truly proved his point.

“Okay, yes, your foot is much bigger than mine, but that’s only because you’re so…big.”

He looks smug in an entirely different way at this comment. It’s refreshing for Ben to feel like his intimidating frame might be somewhat appealing, rather than just cumbersome and ungainly.

“Oh, shut up, you know what I mean!” Rey crows, and it sets Ben off into another round of howling laughter.

Rey huffs, shaking her head and grumbling as she finished lacing up her other boot. When she’s got them both on, she wiggles her leg in an effort to extract it from where Ben still has her pinned. “Are you going to let me up? Because it’s going to be pretty hard to hike from here. Just a thought.”

He’s stopped laughing when their eyes meet again, and the vibe of the entire room shifts, the tension between them palpable.

“What if I don’t want to let you go?” Ben asks.

“Well,” Rey hedges, swallowing nervously, “it’s a good thing you’re coming with me then.”

It’s brave to the point of even being reckless when Ben responds with another question. “What if I want to keep you here, though? In this bed, next to me.”

“Well, I would, um—” There’s no disguising the way Rey’s chest is practically heaving now, her breaths shaky and overcompensating for the way her lungs feel overinflated and empty at once. “Your family is just downstairs, Ben. And that’s—we’re not—I mean…”

She cannot possibly finish her sentence, not with the way her mind has fixed entirely on the image of the two of them shedding layers and ruining the work Ben had done to straighten the sheets.

“You make a valid point, sweetheart,” he says, standing, immediately turning to offer her his hand, as if she needs the assistance to get her feet under her, which is, at this point, honestly not as absurd as Rey would like to believe. “Besides, I promised I would take you hiking. And let’s be honest, we risk Leia trying to track you down in the woods if we’re not back by lunchtime.”

It’s a lame joke, but Rey appreciates the way it eases some of the tension bearing down on them from all sides, as if some invisible force were urging them together.

“Come on, gorgeous. Let’s go. Do you have a coat or anything? Are you going to be warm enough in that sweater?”

Ben pauses by his own bag and pulls out a cable knit sweater than he tugs on over his flannel button-up. He looks like something out of an _L.L. Bean_ catalog, and normally Rey would tease him about it, but between his undeniable flirtation and his unfaltering consideration of her, she just can’t work herself up to it.

“I’ll be okay,” she mutters at length. The weather is brisk, but still temperate, not cool enough yet to require gloves and scarves. She isn’t thinking about the fact that she’s still wearing nothing under her sweater, and while the weave is thick, there’s only so much that wool can do.

They leave the room, and then the house, with as little fanfare as possible. Once outside, Ben catches Rey’s fingers and uses them to lead her the first few steps on the path he wants to take them. The ground is uneven as he points them away from the house, but there’s not much of an incline for the first fifteen minutes or so. Ben leads them around the edge of the water Leia had taken her down to first thing this morning. The trees grow sparser while the sand seems unending the further they get from the cabin, the water visible—and audible—no matter how far they go. Together, they weave through a break in the dwindling trees, over a well-trodden path; as they walk, the ground steepens underneath their soles and the horizon clears. Ben leads her with their hands brushing periodically. They talk and laugh and keep walking, and the entire time, Ben indulges Rey stopping regularly to take all the photos she wants; despite the fact that there’s not much variety in the view, it’s gorgeous nevertheless. She even manages to sneak a photo of Ben watching a butterfly as it drifts over his head that she most definitely does not want to make her lock screen just so she has a reason to see it frequently.

“We’re almost there,” Ben tells her.

“Almost where? I didn’t know we were headed somewhere specific.”

“Don’t get too excited,” he chuckles, taking her hand.

Rey is keenly aware of the fact that no one they might see out here would have any idea who they are, much less any reason to care what the relationship between them is—there’s no one to put on a show for at this moment, and Ben is holding her hand, seemingly for no other reason than he wants to.

“This is just where I used to always come to,” he shrugs. “It’s got a great view, and it’s far enough out of the way that there aren’t too many other people around.”

As the near the edge of the bluff, Ben starts looking between the path in front of them and Rey’s face every few seconds like he’s waiting for her reaction, or maybe even like there’s one in particular he’s hoping to see.

They’re only feet away from the rockface when they come to a halt. Rey is absolutely breathless, and it has nothing to do with the exercise. She drops his hand without even meaning to, stunned by the sight. The vista before them is astonishing; it’s beautiful and vast and overwhelming, and Rey understands completely why Ben seems to love it so much.

“Oh my god, Ben, it’s gorgeous.” She turns toward him and puts her hands on his chest, but almost immediately, she pivots once more to look out over the steep rocks, the clear sand, the water crisp and blue enough that it is nearly indistinguishable from the sky as the sun creeps steadily toward its peak.

Ben wraps his fingers tentatively around Rey’s hips. “You like it?”

“I do, Ben, I love it. Thank you,” she says sincerely. Rey turns once more and rocks up on her toes to peck his cheek, but just as quickly as before, she’s spun back around. Ben revels in watching her pull her phone from her pocket and start taking photo after photo, like she’s capturing a panoramic flipbook of the cliff one frame at a time.

“Rey, I, um—”

She tosses a glance over her shoulder at him but doesn’t stop taking photos as she hums inquisitively.

“I just,” he starts again. “I don’t know if I’m going to get a chance to say it later, and I wanted to make sure that I tell you—thank you for doing all of this. Thank you for coming with me.” She’s looking at him now, and she starts to interrupt, but Ben doesn’t let her. “I know this technically started because you needed a date to mom’s party, but this,” he gestures around them. “I just— thank you for coming with me this weekend. I don’t think I would have come at all if I hadn’t known that you would be with me. I can’t remember the last time I spent this much time with my family without us screaming at each other. And I know you didn’t do it for me, or at least, not _just_ for me, but you let me talk you into coming and—”

“Ben, Ben, hold on,” she stops him. He’s kept his eyes mostly on the ground or his hands as the words poured out of him, but he looks up now to find her watching him with a soft look. “You’re right, I didn’t do this just for you. I did it for my own selfish reasons— _believe me_. You don’t have to thank me for any of this. It’s been…really wonderful, to be honest. All of it.”

“Yeah?”

“Absolutely, Ben.”

He sighs, reaching out to take her hand again, and when he grasps it, Ben uses it to pull her close to him. They’re close enough now for him to lead her hand to wrap around his back, for him to catch hold of her hip, to bury his nose in her messy, windblown hair.

“It’s been a really, really long time since I’ve had anyone who mattered to me like this, Rey.” He kisses her forehead, lips lingering. “But you do. Maybe more than you should, given that I met you a week ago,” he chuckles self-deprecatingly.

“You matter to me too, Ben.” Rey presses her face into his chest, muffling her words because she’s half-hoping he won’t hear them. “I’m scared of what happens when this is over. I don’t want to have to give you up.”

He pushes her back just far enough that he can reach between them and lift her chin so that she’s looking at his face when he tells her, “You don’t have to, Rey.”

She snorts. Like, actually, literally snorts. It surprises Ben in the best way, and his endearingly crooked teeth are immediately on full view.

“Are we just going to stay together forever then? Because we never really talked about an exit strategy for all of this, you know. I mean, I sort of expected that we would just fake break up, but I never thought about the possibility that I’d want to still have you in my life after the charade was over.”

“But you do?”

He’s still smiling, and it’s entirely unfair and distracting, and Rey is personally affronted by how much it makes her want to tangle her fingers in his hair and kiss him until their lungs burn.

“Yeah,” she says instead, biting her lip but refusing to look away from him. She’s almost completely convinced that he feels something for her—even if it turns out not to be what she can no longer pretend she isn’t feeling for him—so there’s absolutely no reason not to take this chance while she has it. “Yeah, I do. I think I’d sort of like to keep you, _Benny_.”

He narrows his eyes at her in the world’s least convincing attempt to look threatening—mostly because he’s _still smiling_ —but he also holds her a little tighter against himself.

“You may live to regret that, sweetheart. If you keep saying things like that, you’re going to get stuck with me for good.”

Rey ducks her head to hide her own smile. It’s stupid, so, so stupid, the way that she keeps feeling herself grow more and more charmed by his unpracticed flirting and his unrelenting sincerity when he speaks to her.

“Would that be such a bad thing?” she asks, not looking up.

“Not for me,” he laughs. “But I’d be getting a much better deal out of it than you would.”

She rolls her eyes, tilting her head up just so he can see them. “Oh, shut up, you. You’re amazing. You’ve blown your cover, mister, and I now know that you are secretly thoughtful and funny and kind.” Her head dips back to his chest and then back up twice as quickly so she can ask him, “Plus, you’ll still have that face, right?”

“The face comes with the package,” he laughs, “though I still maintain I’d be getting the better end of that bargain too.”

Rey lets out a mocking noise. “And here you tried to convince me you were bad at dating. You’re doing just fine, Solo.”

“Is it too cheesy if I say that you make it easy?”

“Yes. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear it.”

His eyes flit over the length and width of her face, and there’s a moment’s pause before he speaks again. “Rey, can I—?”

She doesn’t get to find out what he was going to ask her because her phone starts buzzing in her hand. It’s Leia, so she answers right away—a habit formed at the office, but one that apparently extends to all avenues of her life.

“Hi, Leia,” she says, looking pointedly at Ben who is already huffing silently about the interruption. “Oh, no, we’re um…I don’t actually know where we are. I’m not sure but hold on and I’ll ask Ben.

“How long do you think it will take us to get back to the cabin?”

He rolls his eyes, grumbling something like “can’t even get a few hours alone,” but he answers her, “Probably about forty minutes? Maybe an hour, depending on how fast we walk.”

Rey smirks at him as she answers Leia, “Probably about an hour. Maybe a little more since I keep stopping to take pictures.”

On the other end of the phone, Leia says something that Ben can’t hear, to which Rey responds, “I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time. I’ll just shower really fast when we get back and then I’m all yours for the afternoon.”

It makes Ben pout a little, but he seems unaware of it, and it is so absurdly cute that Rey can’t bring herself to call attention to it for fear he’ll stop. She leans into him once more, stifling her smile into the soft fabric of his sweater. Ben absentmindedly twirls a piece of Rey’s loose hair around one of his thick fingers, eager to reclaim her attention and yet nervous to have it.

He had been so, so close to asking Rey if he could kiss her. Ben had considered just surprising her with it, but even as much as she was flirting with him—and even he could admit that she was—he wasn’t sure that it would be appreciated. He had also spent a fair bit of their journey up here thinking of possible scenarios in which it would make sense for them to kiss. Sadly, being early October, he was bereft of mistletoe, and it wasn’t likely that any of his family members would go so far as to insist on a public display of affection. They had never been that odd and intrusive, or at least, not in quite that way.

Ben vaguely hears her say goodbye before he can make up his mind about whether or not he will try again, but as luck would have it, Rey saves him the trouble. “So, you wanted to ask me something?”

“Oh, uh, I was just, um—.” He can’t do it, he just can’t. He sighs heavily. “I was just going to ask if I could use your phone. To take a picture. Of us, I mean.”

“Ben, are you trying to ask me if we can take a selfie?”

“Poorly, I guess, but yeah.”

Rey makes a face at him like he’s ridiculous, but immediately, she’s pulling him closer, fussing at him for being too tall. Ben considers offering to take the photo, like he had that night outside the party. Instead, he smirks as he uses the arm he still has wrapped around her to lift Rey off her feet, hoisting her up until her head is roughly even with his own. She’s laughing and squealing delightedly even as she pleads with him to put her down, but Ben urges her to take the photo.

She captures three in quick succession: one of them laughing brightly, a more posed one where they’re both smiling and Rey’s head rests on Ben’s collarbone, and one where Rey surprises him by pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth.

It startles Ben in the best way possible. With slow movements, he puts her back on her feet but doesn’t dare to take his hands off her. His eyes search her face and Rey stares steadily back at him. She anticipates him moving before he does so, but in the week that she’s known him, Ben has yet to fail to surprise her.

Instead of the kiss she expects, Ben presses his forehead against hers; he holds her body tightly to his own and breathes deep and slow. They’re close enough that she can both feel and hear his every inhale and exhale. Rey is half a second away from kissing him, still a little baffled as to why he hasn’t done it himself, and then the thought strikes her that maybe he hasn’t kissed her because he isn’t sure that he wants to. Right away, she’s deflating in his arms, not pulling away, but suddenly feeling so much less secure there.

They’ve been on the brink of something all morning—all weekend really. Still, she can’t help wondering if maybe he hasn’t made a move for a reason other than nerves.

His lips are on her forehead once more, and he nudges the tip of his nose against hers. Rey smiles, but it’s dimmer than before, and Ben can’t help feeling like he’s done something to blow it without even realizing. He wants to kiss her, desperately, ravenously, but not if it’s not what she wants. She’s let him kiss her dozens of times now, on her forehead and cheeks and hair and delicate little hands, but it isn’t the same thing, he knows. And now that they’re here, closer than they’ve ever been, the feeling has shifted into something tenuous and uncertain. He can’t remember a moment when he’s ever wanted someone as much as he wants Rey; he’s never had this kind of relationship with a woman—one where the attraction between them didn’t immediately lead them into bed with one another; one where she appeals to him as a human being as much as a prospective partner.

There’s a part of him that wants to believe he’s misreading her right now. That part urges him to kiss her, to risk the rejection if only to find out once and for all where they stand, but he doesn’t want to be that guy. Rey has had enough disappointment in her life without Ben adding himself to the list. He tells himself that it’s only been a week, that there is still more than half of the weekend left, that there’s plenty of time for him to make sure that he does not become the next in the line of things in Rey’s life that she didn’t deserve.

So, he does the unthinkable and retreats. With another kiss placed just above her eyebrow, he pulls back, his hands lifting carefully away. Everything he does to put space between them feels glacially slow, his reluctance manifesting in each of his movements. Ben refuses to convince himself that the look on Rey’s face when he has removed himself entirely from her, apart from where his hand now holds hers once again, is disappointment of any sort. If this is ever going to happen, he is determined that it’s going to be rooted in something much more solid than his own wishful thinking.

“We should head back, I guess,” he mutters, practically whispering. “I’m sure Mom is impatient to whisk you off.”

Rey nods silently. They turn back toward the direction they came and start walking with fingers laced together. The sounds of the water and the wind are loud enough that neither of them feels especially compelled to make conversation, which is good given that neither of them has any notion of what to say at the moment. Eventually though, the silence drags on to a point slightly past comfortable; unsurprisingly, Rey is the one to take the initiative to break it, priding herself on not letting her disappointment ruin what’s left of her time— _their_ time.

“So, what are you going to do while I’m gone with Leia?”

Ben shrugs. “I’m not sure, really. Probably see what Dad’s doing and go from there.”

“Are you—” Rey starts, and then wonders if it’s a question she really entitled to ask if things between them are not what she thinks. When he prompts her to continue, she hesitantly does so. “Are you going to be okay with your dad and Luke all afternoon? I mean, well—”

“I know what you mean.” He seems surprised that she’s asked, but Rey can’t quite discern if he’s displeased about it. “I wish I could confidently say yes. Truthfully, your guess is as good as mine. I won’t pick a fight with either of them, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“You’re not the one I worry about,” she mumbles. After the thing with Luke at breakfast only a couple of hours before, she’s less confident than she had been that they can make it through the weekend without incident, or, well, _further_ incident. Surely Han would intervene if things between Ben and Luke started heating up. After all, he’d defended Ben to Luke once already this morning.

“Thank you, Rey.”

“For doubting your ability to keep yourself busy and not bicker with your relatives?”

“For caring enough to ask. For, I don’t know. For knowing me well enough to worry about it.”

“You don’t need to thank me for that, Ben. I’m sorry if it was presumptuous of me.”

“No, sweetheart,” he lifts their joined hands and kisses hers. “Don’t apologize. I’m… Well, I’m not glad the question needed asking, but I’m glad that you asked. If that makes any sense.”

“It does.” It sounds a lot to Ben like she’s saying _you do_.

A moment later, her tone has perked up a bit. “I’ll have my phone on me, you know, so you can always text me if you get too bored.”

Ben smirks over at her. “I doubt very seriously that Leia won’t keep you busy. I get the feeling that she has big plans for you.”

“I can’t think why. It’s not like I’ve got a credit card burning a hole in my pocket.”

“No,” he grins, “but she does.”

“I’m hardly going to let her take me out and buy me a new wardrobe or anything.”

“Oh, Rey.” He stops them walking. “Baby, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m _not_ sure you’ll get much say in the matter. You know how… _determined_ she can be. You might as well just enjoy it.”

“Ben!”

“What? It’s not like she’s strapped for cash. We’ve always been fortunate that way. And Leia’s never really had the chance to do something like this. She never had a daughter, and Luke never had kids. Besides, you know my mother—she doesn’t ever do anything she doesn’t want to.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Maybe just let her have this one, okay? You can make sure she doesn’t go too crazy… but I think it would be good for you to let someone spoil you a little bit for once.”

The expression sends her mind into something of a tailspin. There are so many ways Rey can imagine him _spoiling_ her, none of which have anything to do with money.

She clears her throat, hoping that her tone doesn’t give away anything about the salacious turn her thoughts had taken. “We’ll see.” She isn’t just talking about Leia, but it’s infinitely safer to let him believe that’s all it is.

\--

They arrive back at the house and Leia is shooing Rey to the shower before she’s cleared the welcome mat.

“Take it easy, Leia,” Han urges, though he’s pretty sure he’ll be ignored. “You’ve got plenty of time. It’s not like we’re on a tight schedule.”

“Hush, you.”

Once Rey has abandoned her damp, sandy boots by the door to deal with later, she heads upstairs, promising Leia she’ll be quick.

“You gonna join her?” Han goads Ben as she goes, and Rey is sorely tempted to turn around so she can see his face. She slows her steps just a little in the hopes that she might hear his reply, but he doesn’t say anything—as if there’s anything to say to your parents when one of them makes a suggestive joke about shower sex with your fake girlfriend.

She goes about showering and putting on clean clothes as efficiently as possible, taking the time to find a bra in her suitcase and everything. Her hair is damp and her face is bare when she comes back downstairs. Han and Luke are nowhere to be found, but Ben and Leia are both in the kitchen waiting for her.

“Ready?” Leia chimes as soon as Rey’s entered the room, and she notices the way it makes Ben chuckle and roll his eyes.

He abandons his post leaning on the counter with his arms crossed over his chest to move over to her. His fingers land softly on her covered elbow, and he ducks his head, pecking her temple. “Have fun, sweetheart.” She answers him with a halfhearted “I will,” but Ben is unsatisfied with this response. He catches her eyes and whispers, “Let her do this for you. Please, Rey?”

Rey’s own face softens, and she nods, telling him this time, more honestly, “I’ll try.”

“Good,” he whispers, kissing her in that spot above her eyebrow once again.

Leia’s impatience seems to have dissipated somewhat with their display. Ben didn’t really expect when they were planning this weekend that his family would care much one way or another about how he and Rey interacted, but his mother has repeatedly worn a fond expression as she has watched them together, even that first night at the party.

“Go easy on her, Mom.”

“Very funny, Benny,” Leia snarks, her eyes turning to the ceiling. “We’ll be back later, probably sometime around five. Try not to burn the place down or anything, okay?”

“Mom, I’m thirty-four, not fourteen.”

“Yeah, well, you’re also your father’s son. Speaking of, don’t let him burn the place down either.”

She starts heading for the front door, assuming that Rey will follow her and that Ben will follow _her_.

“You’re not worried about Luke burning the house down?”

“Well, it’s his house, so I suppose he can do as he likes with it. But if he does decide to torch the place, try to get my things out first, would you?”

“I’m going to assume by ‘things,’ you mean your beloved husband and son.”

“That, too.”

She pats his upper arm and doesn’t wait for a reply before opening the door and stepping onto the wide porch outside. Once again, she’s moving without waiting to confirm that Rey is behind her.

Rey lets her get several steps ahead before she makes any move for the door herself. The prospect of spending hours away from him makes emotions well up in her almost as forcefully as his silly flirting and sincere thoughtfulness have all morning. Still, it’s a little rash—and very deliberate—when she rocks up on her toes and brushes her lips against Ben’s with a touch so faint and fleeting that calling it a kiss would be a generous estimation.

She doesn’t say anything, and she doesn’t linger, instead hurrying to follow Leia across the porch and down the front stairs. She does, however, look back at Ben to find him standing dumbstruck in the open doorway with his fingers against his lips. It’s an image she’s certain to keep in her mind for the remainder of the day, at least until they’re back and he’s there to supplant it with a new one.


	9. ...But a Little's Not Enough

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Saturday, part two. Earn your E rating, my dears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dedicated to all my babes on Twitter who have been desperate to hear all about the lingerie. Your comments fuel my absurdity and I love you for it.

They drive into town in Leia’s sleek BMW X5, entirely unnecessary for life in the city, but which Rey will happily admit is stylish and luxurious in just the right manner to suit her boss.

They stop first at a coffee shop and café for lunch which Rey insists on paying for, even over Leia’s adamant objections. From there, they walk the quaint little Main Street area, peeking in the windows of family businesses that have been there since before they even started coming here, Leia tells her. They duck in and peruse at their leisure, and Rey finds that it’s as easy as it has ever been to enjoy Leia’s company. She’s even able to keep her mind off Ben…sort of.

They visit a bookstore, a couple of antiques shops, and a couple of places that seem to be there mostly for the benefit of tourists. It’s around 2:00 when Leia gets serious about their shopping, no longer content to browse without any particular intent. She leads Rey to one of the boutiques along the road but stops them with her hand on the closed door.

“Now, listen—I know you’re going to fight me on it, and I know you’re going to tell me it’s unnecessary, but I fully intend for both of us to go back to the house this afternoon with bags in tow, which means you are going to let me buy you things.”

“Ben warned me,” Rey mutters to herself, though she’s sure Leia hears her. She drops her chin to face her boss head on and says as firmly as she can manage, “Leia, no. I can’t do that.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because! I appreciate it, I really do, but I don’t want you to spend money on me. It’s not necessary! I’m having such a good time, and that’s more than enough.”

“Rey, honey,” Leia says gently, taking a step away from the door and wrapping her small, ring-laden hands around each of Rey’s. “I’m not doing this because I feel like I have to, or even because I feel like I should. I want to, Rey. I really do. And you know I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t. I could have just as easily left you with Ben all day—which I’m sure he would have preferred,” she chuckles. “Besides, we both deserve to treat ourselves a little bit. We’re on vacation, sort of.”

Rey rolls her eyes, fond and exasperated. “But I wouldn’t be treating myself, would I?”

“Well, no, but only because your boss criminally underpays you.”

Rey’s laughter is genuine. “Leia, you’re my boss.”

“Exactly! Now please, tell me you’ll let me buy you something nice. Please?” Rey still looks hesitant, scuffing one foot against the sidewalk and groaning under her breath. “Don’t make me guilt you with a speech about how I always wanted a daughter and how I spent so many years thinking Ben would never bring home a girl I could do this kind of thing with.”

Rey lets out a disgruntled noise, but Leia knows she’s got her. She squeezes her hand gently and tugs her back to the door and all the way inside this time.

“This shop has some of the cutest stuff in town. I always come in here when I visit. Besides, there’s someone I want to introduce you to.”

They meander through the front of the store for a few minutes until Leia catches sight of whoever she’s apparently been waiting for.

“Leia!” the woman cries, delighted. “You didn’t tell me you were coming up this weekend!”

“It was sort of last minute,” Leia replies, flicking her hand airily.

The two women hug briefly, and Rey takes the opportunity to study the unfamiliar woman. She’s stunning, to be sure—a bit older than Leia, by the looks of her, but still unarguably beautiful. She looks graceful and warm, but not in a grandmotherly sort of way that makes you feel like she can’t help being nice to everyone. Rey gets the distinct impression that, much like her own beloved mentor, this woman—with her long, dark hair, cocoa-colored skin, and impeccable outfit—is as unpretending as they come.

Rey is still silently taking her in when the two ladies break apart and Leia turns toward her, drawing Rey a couple steps forward with a hand on her shoulder.

“Ahsoka, this is my favorite employee, Rey. She also happens to be Ben’s girlfriend.” She says the last two words with deliberate emphasis. “Rey, this is Ahsoka Tano, an old family friend.”

Rey shakes Ahsoka’s hand, determined to make a good impression even though she’s still unused to being introduced in relation to Ben.

“It’s nice to meet you, Rey. Benny clearly has good taste.” She turns to Leia and says enthusiastically, “She’s absolutely gorgeous!”

“Isn’t she, though?” Leia loops her elbow through Rey’s own. “Brilliant, too. Smart as a whip, the hardest worker in the office. And she can more than give Ben a run for his money.”

“You’re keeping him out of trouble then?” Ahsoka asks Rey.

Rey huffs a quiet laugh, feeling her face flush. “And getting him into it just as often, I’m afraid.”

It makes the other women laugh, Leia beaming over at her while Ahsoka winks and says conspiratorially, “Good girl.” She steps back and gestures to her store at large. “Well, welcome. Are you two looking for anything in particular today? Leia, I just got in this pair of heels, and I thought when we were unloading them, ‘Leia would just love these!’”

“I can’t wait to see them,” she chimes. “I would like to treat Rey to a new outfit, but she’s fighting me on it.” Leia pouts pointedly at her, but Rey is unphased by her puckered lips and widened eyes. She makes a face at her mentor to indicate that she’s not sorry.

“Well, that’s just silly,” Ahsoka teases. “Never turn down a shopping spree, dear. Especially not when there are clothes as cute as these on offer! Why don’t you look around and see if you find anything you like?”

Rey nods, and the group splits up as Ahsoka leads Leia over to a wall of shoes ranging from glamorous stilettos to practical rainboots. She meanders through the racks for a while, pulling out a couple of things she likes enough that she is almost tempted to blow her budget a little and buy them for herself. She won’t try them on, won’t give Leia the opportunity to send her home with a closet’s worth of new clothes, even if she could happily afford to do so.

Rey is just getting ready to try to find the other women when she spots an unusual dress hanging right in front of her. It’s the only one of its kind that she sees, not that she’s really even looking at it. Because there’s no way she’s going to let Leia win this fight, and there’s no way she can afford a dress that stunning, right?

“Do you like that one?” Ahsoka has managed to sneak up behind her, and Rey jumps as she whips around to face her, one hand pressing against her now-pounding heart of its own volition. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you.” She gives Rey a minute to catch her breath, and then she asks, “Do you want to try it on?”

“Oh, no. I shouldn’t. It’s probably not even my size anyway. It’s lovely though. Your whole shop is lovely. You have lots of great things in here.”

Ahsoka waves off the compliments, reaching around Rey to take hold of the hanger the dress is on and pull it off the rack, balancing it on two extended fingers. “Try it on.” Rey starts to refuse her again, but Ahsoka cuts her off promptly with a teasing drawl. “You’d better hurry—Leia won’t be occupied forever and there’ll be no getting out of here empty handed if she sees you’ve found something you like.” She winks at Rey again and waits for her to take the dress before pointing her in the direction of the changing rooms, which aren’t so much rooms as square sections divided up by mismatched floor-to-ceiling curtains.

Her movements are hesitant as she ducks into one of the open rooms, pulling the curtain closed behind her. She hangs the dress up and hesitates; she could just _not_ try it on, claim it didn’t fit, tell Ahsoka she didn’t like the way it looked on her as much as she liked the way it looked on the hanger. Somehow, she gets the feeling Ahsoka would see right through that particular lie.

Rey toes off her shoes, pulls her sweater over her head, unbuttons her jeans and shucks them down her thighs, squirming and using her feet to get them the rest of the way down her legs. She carefully pulls the dress from the hanger, appreciating the texture of the thick yet stretchy material. She’s in the process of stepping into it when she hears Leia’s voice out in the store.

“Where’s Rey? I wanted to get her opinion on this.”

“Fitting room. So, this girl—you said she works for you? Is it serious, her and Ben?”

Rey doesn’t know if either of them realize that she can hear them. She decides not to do anything to let them know that she can.

“I hope so,” Leia confides. “She’s worked for me for years now, and she really is amazing, Ahsoka. As beautiful inside as she is out. And you should see Ben with her. It takes about ten seconds to see how completely in love with her he is.”

“How long have they been together?”

“Only a couple of months, I think, but if there’s ever an argument to be made for love at first sight, I’m pretty sure Ben’s got it.”

“And let me guess, she’s just as crazy about him?”

Inside the curtain, Rey’s movements are slow as she shimmies the dress up her body, slips her arms into the long sleeves, and fusses with the zipper, which she can just manage to get closed without needing help.

Hearing Leia’s take on Rey’s relationship with Ben makes her feel so many things at once—joy, guilt, regret, hope, anxiety, denial. She supposes it’s a good thing that Leia seems so convinced, given that they had set out to do just that, but she feels so guilty about lying to her, and the longer it goes on, the more intense the guilt feels. At the same time though, Leia’s assessment of Ben’s behavior toward her is encouraging. Surely that means there’s really something between them, right? That he’s not just a very convincing actor?

“I think so. It’s harder to tell—Rey’s…cautious. They didn’t even tell us until last weekend, though I’m not sure if that was her idea or his—probably his, come to think of it. But the kid’s mooning around after her, and she seems happy enough to let him.”

“That’s great, Leia. Ben’s a good boy. He deserves someone special.”

“She is certainly that. They’re still in that phase where he wants to touch her all the time and she looks at him like she can’t believe he’s there. I told her this morning—I went so many years thinking I might never get to see my son fall in love with someone, and now I’m watching him fall in love with the best girl I could have possibly chosen for him.”

Rey’s tears are unstoppable, but she wipes them away as quickly as they come. There’s no naming her emotions at this moment, both because there are so many of them and because they are so close to overwhelming her.

Meanwhile on the other side of the curtain, Leia’s tone grows much more like what Rey is used to—playful and teasing and sarcastic and sharp all at once. Rey overhears her tell Ahsoka, “You know the irony is that I don’t think they would have told us at all if I hadn’t been pestering Rey about setting her up with someone.”

“Were you planning to set her up with Ben?!” Ahsoka laughs, and Leia grumbles, “No. Believe me, I wish I had thought of it. Though god knows he’d never have let me set him up with anyone!”

She doesn’t mean to, really, she doesn’t—but Rey laughs. Too loudly to not have been heard by Leia and Ahsoka.

“Rey? What did you find? Come out here and let us see.”

Leia is insistent, so Rey sighs heavily once, makes sure her face doesn’t show any evidence of the emotional rollercoaster Leia had unwittingly put her on, and steps through the curtain in the beautiful dress and her fuzzy socks. She stands nervously in front of them, waiting for the always brazen Leia to ask her if she’d heard everything she said, which she knows she won’t be able to deny. Instead, Leia looks her over and smiles, turning to Ahsoka with a smirk to say, “We’ll take it.”

“Leia, no! I was just trying it on!”

“And I’m just buying it. Give it up, Rey, you’re getting the dress.”

Rey does her best to talk Leia out of it while Ahsoka looks on laughing. Eventually, Leia dismisses her, shifting the focus to Rey’s opinion on the shoes Ahsoka had mentioned earlier and a sweater Leia found for herself. Once she gets the approval she doesn’t need from Rey, Leia shoos her back into the dressing room to change back into her own clothes.

“Was there anything else you liked?”

“Loads of things, but none that I’m going to let you buy me.”

“Spoilsport,” Leia smirks. “Go on now, we’ve got another stop to make before we head back.”

Rey nods and ducks back between the curtains to strip out of the— _her_ , now—dress and get back into her jeans and sweater. She comes out to find Leia holding two bags that she declines Rey’s offer to take. They say goodbye to Ahsoka, the older woman sending them off with, “Leia, I’ll see later? And Rey, it has been absolutely wonderful to meet you. I hope to see you again soon, too.”

When they leave the shop, they walk back up the street in the direction they had come from because Leia tells her they’ll need to drive to the next place she wants to take her. She tucks the bags in the back while Rey climbs into the passenger side again. As they drive, Leia tells Rey that she’s known Ahsoka her whole life, that she had become friends with her father before Leia and Luke had even been born. She tells Rey that Ahsoka had grown up in this area, about her history as a women’s rights advocate, and about her brief experiment with retirement before getting bored and deciding to open a boutique, the proceeds of which fund dozens of charitable efforts, including some of those that Resistance supports as well.

Rey’s so enraptured with the story that she hasn’t paid much attention to the drive, not that she’d have been able to identify where they were going anyway. Leia pulls in and parks in the lot in front of a spa built onto one of the fancier hotels that tourists frequent when they come to town for the summer season.

“If we had more time, I’d have booked us a whole day here. Pretty sure Benny wouldn’t appreciate me monopolizing you for that long, but something tells me he’d appreciate you coming home smelling like a peach—among other things. As it is, we’ve got just enough time for mani-pedis.”

It’s not the first time they’ve done something like this together, and while they’ve shopped together a few times before too, this feels somehow like more solid footing. Maybe it’s just because Rey had given Leia a certificate for exactly this kind of thing for her birthday a week before. She feels marginally less guilty about Leia spending money on her this way, though she realizes it doesn’t make much sense.

When they enter the building and Leia immediately approaches the registration desk and informs the perky redhead there that she has a reservation for Organa, Rey realizes how much thought Leia had actually put into planning their little getaway. It makes her smile to be reminded of just how excited Leia has been about this.

The redhead leads them into the spa, through an arched doorway to a nail salon where several employees and patrons are in various stages of the pampering process. Another girl comes over and leads them to two pedicure chairs that are side by side along one of the walls. She leaves them each with leather-bound lists of all of the spas services which also apparently includes a list of all of the options for nail treatments and color swatches for all of the nail polish options they have on hand. For Rey, getting her nails done in a cheap shopping-center salon is a treat, so this place is basically off the charts, which she tells Leia as the uniformed girl returns with another manicurist in tow. Independently, they ask Rey and Leia what services they would like, if they’ve made a color selection, and if they have any allergies or product sensitivities.

While the women set to work on their feet, Leia rolls her head to face Rey. “I’m glad you agreed to come with me today. I was a little worried that things might be…less comfortable between us now that I know about you and Ben.”

“You know, Poe gave me a whole speech before I left the office yesterday about why he expected me to be nervous around you now. I can’t say it made much sense to me, but maybe we’re just the exception to the rule,” Rey jokes.

“Poe Dameron is an idiot. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a wonderful employee and a generally good guy, but I’ve known him his whole life, and the kid is an idiot. I hope you know you don’t need to feel awkward. Your relationship with my son is entirely separate from my relationship with you. I mean, I’m thrilled to have the chance to spend time with you like this, and I couldn’t be happier for you and Ben, but I’m no happier to be doing this with you now than I ever was before.”

“That’s really nice of you to say, Leia. I keep telling people that I’ve known you and Han and Luke for much longer than I’ve known Ben—that you all were important to me before he was. I suppose it’s a little unconventional, but every romantic comedy I’ve ever seen has told me that getting along with the boyfriend’s family is sort of the ideal, right?”

“Yes. Definitely. Benny’s never really brought a girl home before. Not since he left for college anyway, and very rarely before then. And god, I can’t tell you how scared I was that Ben was going to bring home someone I hated. I was dreading the day he showed up with some bottle blonde moron whose singular ambition was to circumvent a prenup.”

It shocks a laugh out of Rey, and Leia smiles triumphantly.

“I never imagined I’d get this lucky, though,” she says with a wink.

“I know the feeling,” Rey mumbles to herself, and then louder, “I’m feeling very lucky this weekend too. I can’t thank you all enough for inviting me to join you.”

“Oh, honey, please, this was all just me being selfish. Anything you’re getting out of it is just a fringe benefit.”

They laugh and talk and sip the infused water they’re brought while their pedicures are finished. When they’re done, the pedicure tubs are stowed away under the chairs and the two women fetch trays of new equipment to complete their manicures.

As they resume their work, Leia falls silent for a couple of minutes and then asks her, “He’s good to you, right? Ben? The two of you are happy? You seem happy, but—”

“Ben makes me—.” Rey feels the need to tread carefully around her answer. She doesn’t want to lie to Leia, not about this, but she also can’t risk saying anything that might arouse suspicion. “No one I’ve dated has ever treated me half as well as Ben does.” She pauses for a moment, and then says quietly, “To be honest, I wasn’t looking for someone when I met him—the opposite, in fact. And I don’t think he meant to change anything, for either of us. It was like I didn’t realize I was missing something. I didn’t know I could be happier than I already was, until Ben. He’s… honestly incredible.”

“He’s needed someone like you—for a long time, I think. Ben deserves to have people in his life who realize what a good man he is. I heard what you said to Luke this morning, you know. I assume Ben has filled you in on the history there.” Rey nods. “It’s—since Ben was a teenager, things have never been especially easy between them. But it means a lot to me to know that Ben has you in his corner. Luke means well, he really does. I mean, you know how he is. But Ben has always had a special way of getting under his skin, and vice versa. I’m just hoping they’re still on speaking terms by the time we get back to the cabin.”

“Well, if it helps, I told Ben to text me if things got…dicey. He hadn’t though, last I checked, so we’ve got a good chance, I guess.”

“I’m tempted to tell you how nice it is that you take care of him like that, but I think we’ve had more than enough sappiness for today, don’t you?”

It’s the end of their conversation about Ben, and they fill the remaining time during their manicures chatting about work, planning for the office holiday party—another event Leia always goes all out on—and discussing the limited progression of Finn and Rose’s relationship. When they’re done, Leia pays and brushes off both Rey’s objections and her subsequent thanks. She tips their manicurists handsomely and compliments their work, admiring her candy apple red fingernails alongside Rey’s, polished in a glossy bluish-gray.

She drives them back to the cabin, a different route than they had taken that morning, and points out various local landmarks as they go, including the restaurant they’re slated to have dinner at that evening. They get back to Luke’s and pile out of the vehicle, Leia still refusing to hand over the bags from Ahsoka’s store. Luke, already dressed for their dinner plans in the cardigan he’d received from Rey and his nephew last weekend and a pair of dated tan tweed slacks, meets them in the entryway. He’s asking them how their day has been, listening to Leia’s recounting of their visit to Ahsoka’s store, when Ben appears at the top of the stairs.

His long hair is still mostly wet so his ears are much more visible than they would usually be. He’s in a pair of dark-wash jeans that fit him so perfectly there’s no chance they haven’t been tailored to his specifications. He’s pulling on another plain tee shirt, this one white and V-necked, as he thunders down to the ground floor, freezing in front of Rey with wide eyes and a cautious smile curling the corner of his mouth. It’s an instant reminder of how she had left him standing in the doorway earlier this morning, mystified from the barest brush of a kiss.

Between heaving breaths, he greets her with a straightforward, “Hi.”

“Hi,” Rey replies, biting her bottom lip around a smile.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Leia groans, though it’s clear she’s enjoying the show. “You two go upstairs before you jump each other in the foyer.”

“Leia!” Rey cries, the effect spoiled by her laughter.

Leia merely cocks an eyebrow as if daring Rey to tell her she’s wrong. She extends the white paper bag holding Rey’s dress to her, insisting, “You should wear it tonight.”

“Isn’t it a little fancy?” Rey asks. When she takes the bag from Leia, the weight makes her think Leia’s mixed them up, but when she parts the raffia handles, the print of her dress through the sheer tissue paper Ahsoka had wrapped it in is the first thing she sees. Beneath the paper package, however, she finds a shoebox and a smaller wad of tissue paper that contains a pair of earrings that match the dress perfectly. She tilts the end of the shoebox up and sees that the size is her own rather than Leia’s, and at this point, she can no longer deny that she knows just what Leia has done.

While her first instinct is to object, Rey stifles it. She settles for sending Leia an unimpressed look that the woman shrugs off happily.

“How did you manage to get exactly the right size?”

“I called Benny while you were getting changed. Now go on, you two. I need to get cleaned up myself. Luke, where is my husband?”

When Rey heads for the stairs, Ben immediately follows her. He hasn’t touched her yet, mostly because he’s not convinced he’ll be able to control himself once he does. She enters the bedroom and hears Ben close the door behind him as he trails her seconds later. Once they’re closed in together and she turns to face him, though, his nerves catch up to him in full force.

“How was your day?” she asks him while she places her bag on the bed and then sits and pulls her boots off. She can practically feel the tension rolling off of him in waves.

“Fine. Good. Went fishing with Dad for a while, watched a movie with Luke. Nothing special. How, um, how did it go with Mom? Did you have a good time?”

“Yeah, I really did. Your mother is one of my favorite people; it’s not hard to have a good time with her. Even if she _did_ manage to triple the amount of things I agreed to let her buy me.”

“You gonna show me what you got?”

She thinks about doing just that, but something mischievous in her mind suggests that making him wait for it will almost certainly be worthwhile, for both of them.

“Well, I’ve been instructed to wear it tonight, so you’ll see it soon enough, apparently.”

He lets it go much more easily than Rey would have expected, even if she’d only been anticipating some playful objections and affected whining. When he bites his lip and edges toward her, she thinks she might have an idea why.

“Rey, about earlier—”

“I’m sorry if that made you uncomfortable,” she interrupts.

Ben looks outraged at the suggestion. “No! No, definitely not. I mean, it was completely unfair because I’ve spent the whole afternoon waiting to ask you if you would let me kiss you properly, but it absolutely did not make me uncomfortable, Rey. Not at all.”

“So, just to verify, it didn’t make you uncomfortable then?”

Ben’s halfway to repeating his insistent denial when he catches on to the fact that she’s making fun of him.

“The whole afternoon, huh?”

“To say the least.”

Rey rounds the corner of the bed to meet him in the middle of the open space in the floor. “I’ll make you a deal,” she drawls. “You go downstairs and let me get dressed now, and maybe I’ll let you.”

“Tempting,” Ben breathes, “but what if I can’t wait?”

“I have faith in you.”

“Okay—then what if I don’t _want_ to wait?”

Rey tiptoes and brushes her lips against the corner of his mouth. Ben chases her mouth when she pulls away, smiling radiantly up at him. “Can’t always get what you want, love.”

He’s near his breaking point, she can tell, but Rey is enjoying this renewed feeling of control, however superficial it is. Moreover, she feels like she needs to get her head around things before they go any further. The day isn’t even over, but it’s been so much to take in, and Rey is still a little insecure. It’s not exactly the ideal mindset to have if she’s about to cross the last threshold between being able to pretend her feelings for Ben are something other than what she knows they are and essentially letting him know too.

“You’re killing me, sweetheart,” Ben whines as Rey backs him against the door, fumbling next to his hip for the doorknob.

She pushes him gently out into the hallway, leaving him with a cheeky, “Maybe I’ll make it up to you,” before she shuts the door in his face.

“My sweater is still in there!” he calls through the wood.

Rey laughs under her breath, looking around until she spots it sitting folded in the frame of the bay window next to where Ben had deposited their luggage the night before. She snatches it up and wanders over to the door, opening it so that she can pass the cashmere garment out to him.

Her arm stretches forward in front of her; she expects him to take the sweater, make some pithy remark, and be on his way. Instead, he wraps a massive hand around her extended wrist, using it to pull her gently out of the room and directly against his broad, cotton-covered chest. The surprise has her floundering a little, but Ben doesn’t give her much time to work herself up before he wraps an arm around her back and places the opposite hand on the side of her face and neck. He pulls her in, lets his eyes scan her face, and then dips his head, his lips finding hers right away.

It’s not an aggressive kiss, per se, but it’s not fleeting, not reluctant, and not soft. He’s verging on frantic, forcing himself to slow down and appreciate the feeling of her soft lips moving against his own. He tests the waters, dipping his tongue into her open mouth, and Rey releases a breathy whimper, kissing him back with no less enthusiasm than Ben himself is showing.

For long moments, their lips and tongues work together, and while he doesn’t ever want to do something he’s not one-thousand percent sure she’s okay with, something inside urges him to lead her back into the bedroom, to lock the door and throw her on the bed and do any or all of the filthy things he’s thought about since that first minute he’d watched her sweep into that Manhattan bar.

It’s only Han’s distant voice downstairs asking Leia if she knows where his shoes are that brings them back to reality and breaks them apart.

Their smiles are both overwhelming—Ben’s giddy, Rey’s awed, and both of them breathless. Ben continues to run a hand over the side of her face, tucking hair behind her ear as he goes. When his hands drop from her, they move to the hem of his tee shirt and promptly pull it up his torso and off his head and arms. He pulls the sweater Rey still holds from her loose grip as her eyes sweep over as much of his bare skin as she can take in. Ben’s hands tugging the bottom of the sweater into place around his hips are what snap her out of her dazed staring, the sudden deprivation of his skin on display for her jarring.

Ben is still beaming down at her when he tosses the white V-neck over Rey’s shoulder and back into the bedroom with no regard for where it winds up. “I’ll let you get dressed now,” he smirks, and with a final stolen kiss at the corner of her mouth, he immediately turns and practically skips down the stairs.

It’s Rey’s turn to stand in the doorway with a gaping mouth and dilated pupils.

Ben glances over his shoulder when he’s almost to the bottom of the stairs, and seeing her standing there makes him laugh, makes him feel like he’s done something right in taking what felt like an enormous risk, makes him think maybe there is a real possibility for something between them even after this weekend is over and gone.

Rey backs up and closes the door without any thought—she’s so distracted and in her own head right now that it would take sirens to pull her out of her daze. She turns and leans with her back flat against the door, practically panting for the few minutes it takes her to even get close to composing herself.

The thing is, as much as she had built it up and fretted over it, now that she and Ben have actually, properly kissed, it doesn’t seem like any smaller a concern. The thought of what they’ve just done looms just as large over her as the anxiety about wanting to do it had before.

She can hear people bustling around downstairs, the old cabin only muffling the noise from below rather than silencing it. She takes deep breaths for a couple minutes more and then realizes that she still has to get dressed—there’ll be no accounting for it if she isn’t, since it’s not as if she can say, “hey, sorry about that, your son just kissed me for the first time and I spent a few minutes trying not to have a heart attack.”

She goes through the motions of getting undressed. There’s no concern for her nudity since she knows she’s alone upstairs—that, and the fact that she’s still much too distracted to be anything like self-conscious. Rey kneels by her suitcase, tugging it over and laying it open on the hardwood. As she’s digging around, her hand once again makes contact with the silky lace fabric of the lingerie she had spontaneously added to her packing the previous afternoon. Unlike this morning, she pulls it out and looks it over, contemplating the skimpy garments. It’s a reckless thought, surely, but part of her wants to put them on in lieu of something more sensible.

Rey has never been the sort to jump straight into bed with someone, but that’s not what this feels like. The fact that Ben has literally _just_ kissed her for the very first time does not in any way change the feeling that all of this has been building for the past week, and while that’s still a little faster than she might normally move with someone she has known for a grand total of eight days, the desire is undeniably there.

There are other reasons, too, why it would be a ridiculous choice for her to opt for the lingerie. There’s no reason to believe that Ben will see her in the lingerie, even if she puts it on. Up until he’d put his tongue down her throat, Rey hadn’t even felt sure that he had any desire to kiss her. Even if she does now have empirical proof that Ben finds her desirable, he doesn’t strike her as a man well versed in the one-night-stand. Moreover, yes, she’s spending her evening with Ben, but she’s also spending it with Leia and Luke and Han. She and Ben aren’t likely to have more than a few minutes alone together between now and the end of the evening when they lay down to sleep next to each other; besides, even if they are going to spend the night in bed together in one way, the knowledge that the other three will be only a flight of stairs away doesn’t exactly make for ideal conditions for them to spend the night together in any other sense.

But still…

The idea of having the lingerie on underneath her dress sends a chill up Rey’s spine. There’s something deliciously scandalous about knowing that you’re wearing something so racy that no one else knows about. Even the thought of it makes her feel confident, sexy. Before she’s really made up her mind to do so, Rey is standing up and stepping into the lacy thong. She slips the straps of the bra onto her shoulders and reaches behind herself to hook the clasp. The lace needs adjusting slightly, so she runs her fingers over the band containing the limited wire framework, the unlined cups, the straps, until every part of it lays exactly right against her ivory skin. There’s no mirror in the room, and she’s not about to sneak to the bathroom in her underwear, so she looks herself over as best she can and tries to tell herself that no one will even know, much less see it, although something about that feels flimsy even in her own mind.

Because she hadn’t thought to bring a curling iron or anything with her—it’s not something she often takes the time to do for work, much less for a weekend in the woods—she spritzes a bit of product in her hair, tousles her fingers through it, and moves on. She removes the tags and steps into her gifted dress for the second time that day, doing up the zipper, fussing with the fabric until it lays just right. She isn’t quite brave enough to attempt her makeup with no mirror, so she collects her limited products and ducks out to the bathroom to use the mirror above the sink. A bit of foundation, some eyeliner and mascara, and a coat of pale peach lipstick later, she heads back to the bedroom to don the things Leia had snuck in among her purchases. The earrings are very much Rey’s taste, simple and versatile, but they’re a little flashier than she’d be likely to buy for herself. The shoes, which she hasn’t even seen until she pulls them out of the box to put them on, are also simple and versatile—burgundy suede pumps with not-too-high heels. They feel glamorous when she puts them on, not because she doesn’t typically wear heels to work if she can manage to avoid it, but because they had been chosen specifically for her, for this outfit, for the sole purpose of wearing them this evening with this dress. She grabs her purse, thinking how glad she is that she had decided to switch before leaving her apartment—the burgundy color matches perfectly, as luck would have it.

Rey feels very elegant and put together as she heads down the stairs to join the others. She encounters Luke and Han first, both of them sitting in the living room talking over the TV that plays news in the background.

“Well, don’t you look nice,” Luke crows. “I see you and Leia had a productive day.”

“Thank you, and yes, I guess we did.”

Luke faces Han, but it’s clear he means Rey to hear him as well when he says, “Pretty sure Ben’s not going to mind her running him out of the bedroom so much when he sees her.” It makes his brother-in-law laugh and Rey blush.

Han winks at her, “Worth the wait, huh, kid?” He watches her cheeks heat further and chuckles mischievously. “Should I yell for him, or do you wanna go find him yourself?”

She isn’t sure how much of a reaction to expect from Ben, if any, but the thought of it happening in front of his father and uncle is less than appealing.

“I, uh, I think I’ll just go track him down.”

“Fair enough,” Han smirks. “Not sure where he went, but the kid’s too big to hide for long, I guess. We’ll call for you if Leia _ever finishes getting dressed_.” The last few words are practically shouted, their purpose mainly to pester his wife who yells back from down the hallway that she’ll be ready when she’s ready.

Giggling, Rey leaves the men in their respective places and turns to head through the dining room and into the kitchen, thinking that Ben must be there. She doesn’t find him, so she goes back the way she came, diverting her course to peek her head out the French doors that lead to the deck. He isn’t there either, so she wanders back through the house, past the living room, peeking down the hallway in case he’s lurking there for whatever reason, and then eventually to the front door, which she opens just in case, though she still doesn’t find him. She’s about to duck back inside when she hears a car door slam shut.

The noise leads her out onto the front deck. Her heels click over the unvarnished wood as she makes her way toward the banister. Over the edge, she catches sight of Ben, standing at the back of his car. _Not a door after all_ , she thinks. She watches him slip a charcoal gray blazer on over the cashmere sweater he’d given her a show with earlier. He runs a large hand through his hair, wavy strands parting around his wide fingers. It’s nice, honestly, to be able to watch him like this, even if only for a moment. He’s completely unselfconscious since he hasn’t yet realized she’s there, and it’s the first chance Rey has really had to observe him while he’s awake—the way he moves, the size of him, the imperfections of his perfect figure.

When he reaches the bottom of the wide wooden stairs that will carry him back to the deck, he seems to realize that he’s being watched. He pauses there and looks up, eyes tracing from the stairs to her heels, up her legs and the length of her body, and then coming to rest on her happy, anxious expression.

“You’re beautiful,” he tells her, and it’s like he hadn’t even really meant to say it, like it was a thought in his head that he couldn’t quite restrain.

“Thank you,” Rey exhales. “You, too.”

Ben chuckles nervously affording her a flash of crooked white teeth. They’re steadily becoming one of her favorite things about him. There’s something absurdly endearing about knowing that this boy who grew up with a fortune the likes of which he probably couldn’t even estimate until adulthood had somehow managed to avoid the dreaded curse of teenaged orthodontia.

Ben mounts the few stairs slowly though it’s clear his goal is to get to her. He stops when he reaches the landing, pausing right in front of Rey, and immediately, his hands are lifting to touch her, one on her waist, the other brushing hair out of her right eye.

“God, you have absolutely no idea how stunning you are, do you?”

There are no words she can say to that, so she closes her eyes to staunch the dampness there, squeezing her lips tightly together as her face flushes with renewed vigor.

“Rey, about before—” he starts, and immediately her nerves are spiking. He could be about to say a hundred different things, but for some reason, the only ones she can think of are those along the lines of _I shouldn’t have done that, it was a mistake, I don’t think we should do it again_.

She steels herself for the onslaught, and there’s no way for her to know that Ben sees her eyes cloud over.

“I—I shouldn’t have done that.”

 _And there it is_ , she thinks.

“I guess I just got a little carried away. It doesn’t have to mean anything; I don’t want you to feel like I’m expecting anything from you.”

It isn’t exactly what she’d hoped to hear, but it’s also not quite as bad as she had been dreading. His words are stuttered, a little frantic, a little desperate. It makes Rey wonder if maybe they’re getting their signals crossed, and of all the ways she can imagine for her to ruin this, she refuses to let this, his misplaced fear that she might not be interested in him for real, be one of them.

“Ben. I didn’t mind you kissing me. You might have noticed—I kissed you back.”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“I liked kissing you, Ben. You didn’t do anything wrong. Besides, we talked about this before we came. I don’t mind you kissing me. I’m your girlfriend for all intents and purposes, right? It makes sense that we would kiss.”

He looks a little relieved, but he’s still studying her cautiously. “Good. Good, I’m glad. I didn’t want you to feel uncomfortable. And it doesn’t have to mean anything, you know? It can just be a kiss, or…whatever.”

That’s the second time he’s said it— _it doesn’t have to mean anything_. In Ben’s mind, it’s his way of trying to reassure her that he won’t push her for more than she’s willing to give him, but to Rey, it just sounds like he’s saying, _I don’t want it to mean anything_.

She’s used to disappointment, to not getting what she wants, to being shut down before she can even _ask_ for what she wants, so really, this isn’t anything new. It hurts, of course. This week has been an absolute rollercoaster of emotions, and she’s exhausted by the weight of her own fickle heart. She’s only just come around to admitting to herself that her interest in Ben is genuine and undeniable. She’s tried not to get her hopes up while also trying to convince herself that maybe this is more than playing pretend for him, too. The attraction between them is apparent, palpable even, but there’s such a long way between wanting to kiss someone and wanting to actually be with them. After all, Ben was single before he met her—technically, he still is, she supposes—and it has to be because he doesn’t want a relationship since Rey knows she could easily find a hundred women who would fight each other to the death for a man like Ben Solo. He’d told her all about his busy life, his preoccupation with work, his social ineptitude (though she has her own thoughts about that last one). He had done practically everything he could to warn her that whatever happened between them would be consigned to that weekend, to the show they were putting on for his mother, to something they could have when it benefitted them and then simply walk away from.

The more time she spends with him, the more certain she becomes that walking away from him is the last thing she wants to do. But Rey is only human, and Finn was right—it’s been a very, very long time since she’s let herself want anyone or anything the way she does Ben. She can do this; she can settle for what he is willing to share with her, and she can make it be enough, and then she can go back to her carefully curated existence to lick her wounds and remind herself what happens when she lets herself get attached to things she knows she can’t keep.

“Sure,” Rey says, clearing her throat. “We can just—not make more of it than it is. Right?”

Ben’s heart sinks in his chest. It’s as good as confirmation that she doesn’t feel as much for him as he does for her. He knows, has seen and felt all weekend long, that there’s something more between them than a fake relationship, but he won’t presume to know what it is on her part. He also knows just as well that where Rey is concerned, he will take whatever she will give him.

“Of course,” he replies. He sighs heavily and watches Rey, and then, determined not to let his disappointment get the best of him, he tries to sound flirty when he asks her, “Soooo…would you let me kiss you again?”

“Is this a hypothetical question?”

“Only if you say no.”

Instead of answering him, Rey takes a step closer and pulls him by the lapel into a kiss just as enthusiastic as the first one and not half as startled. She feels a little breathless to begin with, but as his tongue sweeps along the inside of her mouth, it’s all she can do to remember to breathe at all. It’s far and away the best kiss she has ever had, even though it’s tinged with the insistent thought that a kiss like that must surely mean something, that no one kisses someone that well if they don’t have feelings for the person they’re kissing.

It’s several more long minutes of lips and tongues and gentle scrapes of teeth and clinging hands before the kiss breaks with the interruption of Ben’s family members exiting the cabin.

“I told you they were out here.”

It takes them a second to register that other people have joined them and that it’s probably not appropriate for them to be making out and halfway to groping one another in full view of his family while the sun continues to set over Montauk.

“Yes, Luke, you were right, congratulations,” Leia huffs sarcastically.

Both Rey and Ben try not to look conspicuous and guilty as Rey surreptitiously runs her fingertips over the corners of her mouth and Ben tugs at the hem of his sweater.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Leia tells them, already walking toward the stairs, “but if we don’t go now, I think your father is going to stage a coup.”

“If you didn’t take forever to get ready…”

“Then I wouldn’t look half so good.”

“And you’d still be perfect, your worshipfulness.”

Rey smiles at the banter, and for a split second, she allows herself to think about how much more Ben has in common with his father than he would likely admit.

The group tromps down the stairs and heads for Leia’s SUV, which Han insists on driving. Ben has the door on one side open and is offering Rey a hand up when Leia turns from the passenger seat and says, “Oh, Ben, actually, would you mind driving you and Rey in your car? We’re going to have drinks with Lor and Ahsoka after dinner—I assume you won’t want to join us?”

“Uhhh no, probably not. That’s fine, I’ll drive. We’ll meet you guys there.”

He closes the door to the BMW and he and Rey move to his car instead.

“So, that was embarrassing, right?” Rey giggles.

Ben laughs along with her, “Probably pretty convincing though.”

“Which bit, my tongue in your mouth or your hand on my ass?”

It’s dark enough that she can’t see the way a rosy hue spreads over his cheeks and up to the tips of his ears.

They drive behind the SUV the rest of the way to the restaurant and it’s silent apart from the radio playing quietly in the background. When they get there, Ben parks and then sprints around the front of the car to open the door for Rey like he’s taking her on a proper first date instead of dinner with his family.

“You do look beautiful, Rey,” Leia tells her when they join the group at the door. “Doesn’t she look beautiful, Han?”

“Course she does,” he says gruffly, but he bumps Rey’s shoulder with his own. “What are you asking me for anyhow? Isn’t he supposed to be the one telling her how beautiful she looks?”

“I already told her,” Ben snaps jokingly at his father. He turns to Rey and fairly croons, “But I’ll gladly tell you again, sweetheart.”

“I appreciate all the compliments, but can we maybe stop talking about me?” They all laugh at her embarrassment, not unkindly, and Ben plants a kiss in her hair on the side of her head.

The group is led to a table near the back of the restaurant, a few of the locals recognizing Luke or Leia and waving hello as they pass. They haven’t been seated more than a few minutes when a man about Han’s height with white hair and deep wrinkles creasing his slender face stops by the table. Rey is introduced to Lor San Tekka, the proprietor of the restaurant and another old friend of the family.

He makes a point of telling Ben how good it is to see him here again, how delighted he is to meet his girlfriend, what a wonderful couple they make. It’s one of those things that people say even when they haven’t seen the couple in question together for more than a couple of minutes, but it makes Ben and Rey share quiet, pleased smiles with one another all the same.

Leia invites Lor to join them, but he waves her off, telling them to enjoy their meal and that he’ll join them at the bar afterward. They do enjoy their meal; the food proves to be exceptionally good, in fact, and they all eat voraciously. Lor sends a selection of desserts out to them, and they’re all just as good as the food, all five of them trading bites.

Once or twice, Ben lifts a spoon to Rey’s mouth, watching attentively as she wraps her lips, now mostly bereft of lipstick, around it and draws the decadent treats into her mouth. When he feeds her a bite of the chocolate raspberry cake he seems to favor, he can’t manage to resist leaning in and pressing a chaste kiss to her closed mouth. Leia _awwws_ at the sight, Luke rolls his eyes, albeit fondly, and Han looks on thoughtfully, though neither Ben nor Rey takes any notice of his careful study of them.

When they’ve finished their meal, Luke passes Ben a key, telling him to tuck it under the mat once they’ve let themselves in. Lor convinces them to stay for the first round of drinks, asking them both about their jobs, their lives in the city, and the classic questions about how long they’ve been together, how they met, and so on. The whole time, Han is unusually attuned to the conversation and the little touches they share throughout the evening. For her part, Rey can only really pay attention to the way Ben seems to grow less patient the longer they linger at the bar. As quickly as he can, he begs off, claiming unconvincingly that they want to give the old friends some time to catch up.

The drive back to the house seems to take half as long as the drive into town, though maybe it’s just that Rey is caught up in her thoughts the entire time. He pulls them into the driveway, but this time Ben doesn’t make it out fast enough to open Rey’s door. She doesn’t linger in the vehicle whose rich leather smells impermeably like its owner. She’s been squirming in her seat practically since they got back in the car, though subtly enough that Ben hasn’t thought necessary to comment on it if he’s noticed at all, thank goodness.

He does touch her hand as they both head for the steps, the backs of them brushing as their fingers weave loosely together and apart as they walk. When he lets them in, the house is quiet, and Rey steps through while he slips the key under the doormat like his uncle had requested. He locks the door behind them, not bothering to turn on any of the lights downstairs. He assumes that Rey is eager to get out of her heels, and he is eager to be wherever Rey is.

The knowledge that they’re alone is heady. It makes Rey feel a little like she’s a nervous virgin all over again which makes her roll her eyes at the absurdity. Granted, she’s never had a proper one-night-stand, every sexual relationship she’s had lasting at least a few weeks. Moreover, there’s nothing to say that she has to sleep with Ben tonight, or that he’ll even want to, but she finds that she _does_ want to. This is almost certainly the only time they’re going to be alone this weekend, and there’s no knowing when she might see him again after tomorrow. Coupled with the tension that’s been building for days which practically burst over this evening when they essentially made out on the front porch, it makes the impending possibility impossible to ignore.

Rey enters the bedroom first, flicking the light switch by the door and immediately moving to use the end of the bed to balance so she can pull her heels off. Ben watches her kick one foot up behind her, pull off the high heel and bend to place it gently on the floor before duplicating the actions with the other foot. When she’s barefoot, he notices that her toenails match her smartly polished fingers both in color and delicacy.

Rey picks up the heels and walks to the other side of the bed with them, placing them back in the box they had come in. She does the same with the earrings, replacing them on the cardboard placard and folding them back into the tissue paper Ahsoka had wrapped them in before they left the store. Ben is completely charmed by how careful she’s being with the items. He knows it’s nothing to do with fragility and everything to do with the kind of care Rey takes of her things, likely a remnant of her childhood spent doing without things and having to make those she did have last as long as they could.

She bends to collect the pajamas she had abandoned that morning, but her movements are slow, exaggerated, almost as if she’s waiting for some sort of cue. Taking risks with Rey has served him well so far, so Ben decides he will take another.

“Do you need help with your zipper?”

“What?” She sounds surprised, standing back up so quickly that she drops her sleep shirt by accident. He arches an eyebrow, tips his head in the direction of her back. “Oh, no, I uh, I can manage.”

“Let me?” Ben asks, failing to keep the pleading tone from his voice.

She inhales sharply, her shoulders rolling back with the force of it, but she deposits her pajamas on the corner of the bed and walks over to him, turning so that he has access to the zipper holding her dress together in a line up her back. It isn’t easy to make his large fingers move with any sort of delicacy, but Ben does his best. He sweeps the hair that’s just long enough to brush the neckline of the dress into one hand. With her skin bared to him this way, innocent as it is, he can’t resist putting his mouth on it, and honestly, he’s not interested in trying to. His parted lips practically wrap around the notch of bone at the top of her spine and he hears her squeak quietly as she tries keep her breathing even.

Ben is still holding her hair in his left hand as he uses his right to catch the pull of the zipper and draw it downward. It’s several more inches of skin that are suddenly visible, but it’s the flash of black lace that catches his eye. It looks like a standard enough bra, if perhaps a little fancy, but the stark contrast between her creamy skin dotted intermittently with light freckles and the darkness of the fabric is enough to hold his gaze and make his head swim. Ben drops her hair and uses both hands to part the two halves of the fabric, and then he ducks again and kisses down the top of her spine three more times in quick succession. When she doesn’t object, he slides his palms under the dress against her waist, his wrists pushing the split fabric further apart. He continues to kiss her bare skin, over her shoulder blades, back up to her neck.

“God, sweetheart, all day long.” His speech is broken up by her forcibly suppressed whines, their combined panting, and the way he can’t seem to pry his lips off her for more than a few seconds at a time. “All day long, every time he mentioned you, Dad kept calling you _my girl_. ‘ _Your girl_ ’s outside,’ ‘you and _your girl_ seem happy,’ ‘ _your girl_ will be back soon.’ I swear to god, it was all I could think about. You, being mine. _Making you_ mine.”

Rey moans at the thought of it, and she thinks she might have something of an inkling of how he’s felt all day. There’s something impossibly sexy about the possessive sort of growl that wraps around Ben’s words, and Rey finds herself wanting, desperately, for him to make her feel like she’s his, even if he only wants her for this, even if only for a little while.

He’s got her pressed between his body and the footboard of the bed now, his figure firm against her smaller frame, looming over her like it would kill him to put an inch more space between them.

“I’m not going to touch you unless you tell me this is what you want, Rey.”

“What do _you_ want, Ben?” she breathes.

He hesitates before muttering, “That doesn’t matter.”

Rey turns in his arms, puts a delicate hand on the side of his face, tilting his chin upwards until her eyes meet his, bright and wild and desirous as they are.

“It does. It matters to me, Ben. More than I think you realize.”

He lets out a sound that’s nearly a growl while leaning in closer, nuzzling the tip of his nose over her cheeks, her eyebrow, her chin. He presses a kiss to the space where her neck and her jaw meet.

“You know what I want.” The gruffness of his voice would give him away, even if the words themselves didn’t.

Rey’s lips twitch upward, not quite fully smiling, and she arches her upper back to press herself closer to him and the heat of his mouth where it’s still trailing over her exposed neck, the top of her dress slipping further down her torso so that the top of her lace bra comes into view.

“What if what I want is for you to tell me what you want?” she asks, fingers lifting to comb through the thick waves of his perfect hair.

“ _Is_ that what you want?”

She nods, whining a shaky, “yes, Ben,” as he drags his teeth lightly over her clavicle. Breathlessly she commands him, “Tell me.”

Instantly, Ben groans, pressing closer and bending to shove her dress further down her body until it falls from her hips straight to the hardwood floor. He undoes the laces of his shoes with proficiency and then stands back up, pulling his sweater over his head and discarding it as he kicks the shoes completely off.

With his chest bare and her stripped to her underwear, Ben wastes no time scooping her up, moving to press her spine flat against the thick wood of the closed door. Rey wraps her dangling legs around his body, her heels digging softly into his tailbone. At this new height, she’s elevated enough that her breasts are flush with his own chest and she can feel him through his jeans, his hardness grinding against her crotch to smear the wetness seeping into and straight through the scant fabric of her underwear.

Ben takes a moment to kiss her senseless before he starts telling her all of the wanton, filthy things he would like to do to and/or with her. He is captivated by the sight of her with mussed hair and wide eyes and pink cheeks, close enough for him to feel everything down to the warmth coming off of her silken skin. He lets his eyes scan over her face, taking in every detail that he can; they drop to her neck, her bare shoulders, and eventually to her small breasts that are torturously tempting in sheer black lace. Ben wedges a knee up under her ass so she’s still entirely supported when he pulls one hand up to skim over the triangles formed by the cups of the delicate bra.

It's not a functional garment, Ben realizes the more he looks at it. The straps are thin, the cups unlined. It’s clear to Ben that this is not just sexy underwear—this is _lingerie_. It’s meant to be pretty, not practical, and as Ben trails fingertips over the deep rosy pink of Rey’s clearly visible nipples that are slightly tenting the material that partially obscures them, he is more than a little bit smug as he realizes that Rey had worn this with the intent of being seen.

 _By him_.

Suddenly, he’s helpless to the desire coursing through him. He thrusts his clothed hips against her nearly bare center, kisses down to the valley between her breasts and flicks his tongue over the peaks of each of her lace-covered tits.

“Fuck, Rey,” he groans, “what _don’t_ I want from you?”

“Yeah?” she whimpers.

He nods, maintaining the push and pull of their colliding hips. He fingers one of the straps of the bra, pulling it down off her shoulder. “I want to believe that you put this on for me. Wanna get you naked. I want to kiss every inch of your skin, pin your hips to the bed and put my face between your legs. Wanna lick you until your thighs are twitching around my ears.”

“Oh, fuck, Ben,” Rey moans, hands scrabbling to reach the button of his jeans.

“You want that, sweetheart?” Rey tosses her head in a frantic nod. “Wanna let me taste that sweet little pussy?” Her whines, as well as the tugging on his hair which she’d resumed when she’d realized she can’t reach his pants drives him on. “I want to make you come on my tongue, feel how wet and soft you get when I get you off. And then, while you’re still all sensitive and blissed out, I want to flip you over and sit you on my cock. I wanna put it so deep in you that all you can feel is me throbbing inside you.”

“Yes, Ben,” she breathes. “I want that. I want to feel you inside me, love.”

That’s all he needs to pull her away from the door, hands on her ass as he carries her over to the bed. He drops her down onto it, watching as she bounces slightly with the impact. Rey is quick to start stripping him out of his remaining clothing. She has his jeans around his knees before Ben has managed to even get her bra clasp between his fingers. He pulls his feet free from the tangle of denim, using the opposite foot to pull off each of his socks while she dips her little fingers into the band of his underwear and starts shoving them off his hips.

Ben halts her long enough to get her bra open, the band hanging loose on either side of her, but he makes no move to lift the fabric off entirely. He feels delirious at the sight of Rey laid out over the crisp white bedding, her flushed pink skin draped in black fabric all the more appealing for the contrast.

“Fuck, baby.” Ben’s mouth has fallen half open as he stands over her breathing heavily. “You’re perfect.”

He’s still fixated on the miles of bare skin and black lace when he registers her giggle breaking through the thick fog.

“I’m really, really not,” she tells him, smirking up at him. “Still want to fuck me?”

Ben doesn’t bother replying; instead, he shucks off his underwear, dropping them to the hardwood that’s cool under his bare feet. Rey watches his—frankly _gorgeous_ —cock bobbing against the defined lines of his ab muscles as he climbs onto the bed, holding himself up over her as he immediately dips his head to start kissing her again.

He bends his knees up under himself, pulling her legs to rest on either side of his wide figure and then uses his hands to remove the bra from where it lays pointlessly over her tits. His lips fall to her bare skin, kissing and licking a hot path down her body until he’s flat on his belly between her spread legs with his chin resting over her partially covered mound.

He dips his head and presses a close-mouthed kiss to the top of the fabric. “Can I?” he whispers.

When Rey whines, “Please, Ben,” he smiles against the skin of her thigh, right below the line of fabric that wraps around her hip.

The panties are the same revealing material as the bra he had already appreciated, so it seems only fitting to Ben that they receive the same degree of attention. He wraps his large fingers around the lines of fabric covering each of Rey’s hips and starts tugging slowly downward, kissing alternate patches of skin both of her legs as he goes. When he gets them clear of her dainty feet, Ben wastes no time in running his palms flat up the length of her legs until they reach her thighs. Slender enough for him to nearly wrap his hands all the way around, he tugs them apart without hesitation.

He takes a deep breath against her mound, exhales heavily; his face is so close to where she wants it, close enough that Rey can feel the heat of each breath on her damp folds. His nose just barely brushes over the inches of newly exposed skin and neatly trimmed hair, the feeling at once lulling her and setting her every nerve on edge. It catches her off guard when he turns his face and sucks at her inner thigh, his teeth sinking lightly into her flesh, just enough for the imprints to remain there when he draws back and presses soft kisses over the freshly bruised spot. Rey had practically levered herself upright with the initial sting, the fingers of both hands threading through his perfect hair, not so much pulling as just flexing and releasing against his scalp.

She pants through her nose above him, biting her bottom lip—already swollen and reddened as a result of their feverish kissing—when his eyes lift to hers. He noses at her cunt again, barely brushing her clit on his path.

“Ben, please.”

He looks delighted, tugging her with his hands on the back of her thighs until she’s tipped onto her back once more. He slides her toned calves over each of his shoulders, one and then the other, pressing a kiss over each ankle as he maneuvers her where he wants her.

He takes a minute to appreciate the sensory overload of the moment. He looks up the length of her torso to her beautiful face, watches the way her chest is slightly heaving and hears her little mewling sounds. He runs fingers over the heated skin of her thighs where his arms are wrapped around to hold her in place and makes note of the surprising spike of desire when he feels the soles of her feet laid flat against the skin of his back. Ben inhales sharply, the sweet tangy scent of her making him practically salivate. And then finally, _finally_ , Ben closes the distance between his mouth and her soaked cunt, diving headlong into his task.

Rey cries out, slapping a hand over her mouth when she realizes how loud the sound actually is in the quiet of the house, the fact that they’re alone not at all diminishing her awareness of being in borrowed space.

Ben draws back, his words coming out muttered and rushed, “Fuck, you’re perfect, sweetheart. Your little pussy’s so wet. So sweet, baby.”

She makes another noise, this one much quieter, and encourages him to go on. Ben readily concedes. He’s not sure which of them is more eager for her orgasm. His tongue works frantically over her tight opening, nose continually brushing her clit, though not providing anything like the pressure she wants on it right now.

“Ben—fuck, love, my clit. Suck my clit,” she whines.

He finds it absurdly sexy to hear her tell him exactly what she wants, and he’s more than happy to oblige her, tongue sweeping up the distance until he can wrap his full lips around her clit and worry the tip of his tongue over it in torturous little flickers.

Rey moans again, her volume rising once more. To stifle herself, she grasps blindly for one of the overstuffed pillows and smashes it down over her face. Ben can’t help but chuckle at the action, the vibrations making Rey scream as quietly as possible into the thick fabric.

Ben abandons her clit to slurp greedily at the gush of arousal that precedes her orgasm then untangles his right hand from her leg—well on the way to twitching just as he had hoped—and presses two fingers into her, cooing comfortingly up at her as he resumes fleeting brushes over her clitoris.

“God, Rey, you’re so fucking tight. I love the way you’re squeezing around my fingers, sweet girl. I can’t believe you’re letting me touch you like this.” He sounds truly awed by the revelation.

There are muffled cries, pleas, and various statements of affirmation and encouragement coming from under the pillow Rey is still holding over her face.

He laughs again, still teasing his fingers inside her. “You know, nobody else is here right now. You can be as loud as you like, baby. I think I would rather enjoy that, in fact.” He smirks up at her and then dives for her clit again, sucking deeply for another long moment, the barest brush of teeth just grazing the edges of the bundle of nerves, and then he’s speaking again. “I think you’re close, sweetheart. Aren’t you? You gonna come, gorgeous?”

Rey is almost entirely unable to keep herself quiet, even under the constraint of the pillow. Ben feels a little smug, but mostly, he feels even more desperate to get Rey off, desperate to watch her fall apart, to know that _he’s_ _made her_ fall apart.

His fingers scrape against the front wall of her cunt, readily finding the sensitive spot that makes her clench wetly around him. He works her clit furiously with his tongue and his lips, slipping a third finger in next to the other two and reaching as deep into her heat as he can.

Reluctantly, Rey pries the pillow off her face, propping herself onto her elbows and giving him a full view of her scarlet cheeks, her eyes huge with pupils blown wide. “Ben,” she whispers brokenly, “Ben, I’m going to come. I’m gonna come.”

He doesn’t say anything, but he does wink up at her before he returns his full focus to his fingers dragging in and out of her, his mouth working enthusiastically in tandem.

And then suddenly, all at once, Rey’s hands are flailing, fingers clenching and grasping at his back, his neck, his hair. A single whimper rings out in the room before her mouth falls open into a silent shout, her perfect teeth just peeking out from under the plump circle of her lips. Ben licks at her until she has stopped clenching around his fingers, until he’s wet all the way down his palm, until she’s breathing heavily and tugging him upward.

He lifts himself onto his hands and surges for her mouth, their lips and tongues clashing immediately, eagerly. He knows he’s getting ahead of himself, knows that it will only make things worse for him in the end, but this doesn’t feel like they’re just fooling around, and it doesn’t feel like it could ever mean nothing.

“Your cock, Ben,” she moans, “Fuck me. Please, love, fuck me.”

There is nothing in him that would dream of denying her—not anything, but least of all this.

He nods, rolling them over as promised so that he’s sitting with his elbows leaned back on the bed and she’s balanced with her thighs on either side of his own. She steadies herself with a hand on his chest as she lifts up onto her knees. He raises an eyebrow at her as each of his hands wrap around one of her hips. Her only confirmation is a knowing smile and her hand reaching down to wrap around his impossibly hard cock to position his tip at her entrance.

His breath catches in his chest and releases in the form of a sharp groan from behind clenched teeth. She leans down and they meet in the middle for a slow kiss; she keeps hold of him while she starts to sink down, the stretch intense despite the three fingers he had had in her moments before. Their mouths break apart when she has the head of his cock inside her, both of them already near panting.

“Ben,” she gasps, tipping her head back on her shoulders as she sinks down another few inches, his fingers undoubtedly digging bruises into her hips he’s clinging to her so tightly. Ben presses kisses to whatever parts of her neck, chest, and shoulders he can reach as she rotates her hips fractionally and sinks that much further onto his substantial. And then suddenly, she rolls her head forward again, holding his eyes as she drops the remaining distance until she’s fully impaled on him.

They are both definitely panting now, fighting to keep desperate sounds and even more desperate words from escaping.

“Fuck, Rey. You feel absolutely incredible.” He kisses her. “So perfect around me, sweetheart.”

They kiss feverishly again and again, lips parting only to fuse again. Ben’s arms have migrated to her back, wrapped tightly around her, pinning her to his chest. It limits their range of movement somewhat, but he doesn’t even care. He can’t lament the closeness, the intimacy. His mind is a steady stream of ReyReyReyRey repeating on a loop, but his mouth is much better occupied by her own.

Rey clings to him just as fiercely. She rotates her hips, grinding against him while fighting to keep his full length inside her as much as she possibly can, and Ben gives her as good as he gets, thrusting up into her and using his grip to add force to her downward strokes. There’s no pattern to her movements and not much rhythm to them either, but it’s perfect in its incoordination. It feels like all of the best parts of a first time with all of the ease and compatibility of practiced lovers.

They work in tandem for several minutes before Ben pulls his mouth away. He’s breathing hard and his face has bloomed a deep shade of red.

“God, sweetheart, so good. Are you close, Rey? Do you think you can come again?”

She nods, unable to speak and not exactly eager to stem the flow of his own words.

“Can I touch you, baby?” he asks, but it’s perfunctory as he’s already working a hand between them to press the pad of his thumb to her clit, winding circles against it in counterpoint to the continued collisions of his cock in her cunt.

She threads her fingers into his hair again, tugging lightly on the silky strands as she moans aloud, begging him to “keep touching me, Ben. Want your hands on me when I come, love, please.”

He smiles faintly where he’s tucked his face against her shoulder, and without looking up, he grits out, “I’m close, Rey. Do you want me to pull out, baby? Because if you don’t want me to come in you, I need you to tell me now.”

Rey shakes her head almost frantically. “Don’t pull out, Ben. I’m on the pill; I want to feel you—want to feel it when you come.”

“You’re going to feel it a lot sooner if you keep talking like that,” Ben laughs breathily, and Rey joins him.

“I don’t know if that means you want me to stop or to keep talking.”

“Honestly, sweetheart, I’m not sure. Not sure it’s going to matter, either. I’m so fucking close.”

“Come, Ben. Let me feel you.”

He tries to keep working her clit through it, but it’s another request Ben is helpless to deny her, and right away, he’s coming harder than he has any time in recent memory, if ever. He muffles his satisfied roar against the skin between her breasts, but they’re loud anyway as Rey moans above him, relishing the feeling of his hot come filling her clenching cunt. Between that and his attempt to resume the movements of his thumb on her clit, Rey follows him directly over the edge, thrilled to feel him still hard inside her as the walls of her pussy clamp tightly around his cock.

The pressure on his sensitive length makes him hiss, but he wants nothing more than to stay inside her for as long as she’ll allow. They pant together as they come down, Ben once again kissing her repeatedly, wherever his lips can find purchase. When their breathing has begun to even out, Rey spreads the fingers of one hand wide over the side of his face and tilts his head up so that she can kiss him properly. Their lips move together until they’ve both more or less settled down, and when she can no longer feel the internal spasms of her lingering orgasm, Rey lifts herself off his cock and falls to the bed next to him.

Ben immediately rolls toward her, his hand brushing up and down over her bare hip as they both continue to come down. They’re breathing almost normally when Rey stretches forward and pecks a kiss to his shyly smirking mouth before she rolls over and gets out of bed.

“Where are you going?” Ben asks, knowing he sounds whiny and probably a little pathetic.

“Bathroom. I’m not willing to get a UTI to cuddle, not even for you,” she grins.

“Fair enough,” he jokes. “I…cannot really blame you for that. Go pee, and then come back and let me spoon you.”

Rey laughs and rolls her eyes; it’s the easiest things have felt between them since that morning, and she’s reluctant to risk ruining that, but she knows she has to. She searches for the oversized tee shirt she’d slept in the previous evening, but it must have fallen off the bed at some point because there’s no sign of it now. She looks around, not excited to put her dress back on but also unprepared to step out into Luke’s hallway naked, even if they are the only two people in the house. As she’s looking around, she finds the white V-neck tee shirt Ben had stripped off after kissing her for the first time hours before and she bends to grab it, pulling it over her head without hesitation.

“Are you wearing my shirt?” he asks, like he hasn’t been laying there with his eyes fixed on her since she’d gotten out of bed.

“Well I’m certainly not going to stroll around naked! Your family could be back any time, and even if they’re not, it feels incredibly weird to think of being naked in any place that your parents and Luke could even _potentially_ be. And before you tell me that I’m ridiculous or whatever, you know you would feel exactly the same way if we were in someone else’s house right now.”

“No, I get what you mean.” Ben sits up and grabs one of the hands that Rey’s been gesturing with as she spoke. He uses it to pull her back over to the edge of the bed and to get her to lean down so he can kiss her again. “I was actually just going to tell you that you look really fucking cute wearing my clothes.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Mmmm absolutely. Not quite as good as you look naked, but pretty damn good.”

As Rey speaks, he kisses her between every word, never letting her get more than one out before his lips are back on hers. “You” _kiss_ “are” _kiss_ “ridiculous” _kiss_.

She pries herself out of his grasp, dancing just out of his reach unless he gets up from the bed, and walks over to the door, swiveling her hips exaggeratedly as she goes.

“OH, that is not fair. You are playing dirty, Rey!”

She shrugs when she reaches the door, batting her eyelashes dramatically at him over her shoulder just before she pulls it closed behind her.

Once she’s securely behind the closed door of the bathroom, Rey goes through the motions of her normal post-sex routine—not that she uses it all that often—but her thoughts are absolutely consumed with Ben.

They just had sex. She let him fuck her. He wanted to fuck her.

All of these things that are inescapably true bang around in sharp counterpoint to his earlier, “It doesn’t have to mean anything,” which lingers like an omnipresent specter over the best sex she has ever had with the man who scares her more than anything else in her life at this time.

Tomorrow he will drive her home. Maybe he’ll carry her bag up for her—Ben is the type to do that sort of thing—maybe he’ll come in for a little while; maybe he’ll kiss her goodbye. But what happens after that? They will have no reason to see one another, and Rey knows the charade won’t be able to continue forever, but the thought of having to let him go entirely is nauseating.

She washes her hands and wipes away her smudged eye makeup with a tissue—the kind with lotion that she always feels too cheap to buy, even if she knows they are of superior quality.

She can’t stay in the bathroom any longer, and frankly, she doesn’t want to, not when she’s got a beautiful man waiting for her in the bed they will share for this one more night. It’s just that she’s not sure what to expect when she goes back to Ben. They’ll sleep next to each other once more, sure, but is she allowed to touch him now? Will he kiss her like he hasn’t stopped doing since they arrived last night? Will he want to pretend like what they’ve just done has really changed nothing between them? Or worse—make it clear that it’s only changed things for her?

She takes a deep breath before stepping into the bedroom again. He’s lying on his back although the overhead light is still blazing, doubtlessly glaring in his eyes uncomfortably. Ben has pulled the blankets loose from where he made the bed this morning, and he now lies snugly underneath, the fabric covering him up to his sternum so that she can’t see if he’s still naked or if he’s bothered to put on underwear or pants of any kind. When she closes the door and leans back against it, Rey can feel her hands shake, so she quickly folds them behind herself, palms pressing against the smooth wood while her knuckles dig shallow divots into the small of her back.

He smiles at her, boyish and beautiful, studying her with a smug glint in his eyes, like he’s won some sort of victory she didn’t know he was competing for.

“Come here, sweetheart.”

Rey does as he asks, turning the light off and trying to make some sense of normality as she edges over to the bed and sits down on the side she had occupied the night before. She doesn’t get under the covers, instead tucking her knees tight, her calves and feet sweeping to the side as she struggles to pull the hem of his stolen tee shirt down over her thighs.

Ben has rolled to his side and lays facing her, arched eyebrows and an amused grin just awaiting her notice. She looks at him but can hardly stand to hold it for more than a few seconds before turning her head to the front, picking at a loose thread on the top quilt.

“Rey, you know I just saw you naked, right? I was literally inside you ten minutes ago. I think we’re past the point where you need to feel shy.”

She blushes furiously, and while Ben seems even more pleased with himself, Rey hates that her own body is giving her away now. It becomes clear after a minute spent in relative silence that he’s waiting for her to say something. At first, her voice comes out feeble and rusty, so she swallows repeatedly and forces something like an even tone to tell him, “Just because I was naked while we were having sex doesn’t mean it’s cool for me to be naked all the time.”

Ben _hmmms_ thoughtfully. “I _guess_ ,” he squints, “but for the record, I am always very cool with you being naked around me. Like right now, for instance. If you wanted to be naked, I would be very, very okay with that.” The hand at the end of his free arm creeps over to her knee; palm flat, it runs up her thigh, burning a wide swath of smooth skin as it goes. When he reaches the hem of the tee shirt, his fingers fiddle with it, twisting and tugging lightly on the fabric.

Rey finds him watching her face carefully with his lower lip tucked between his teeth.

“Ben!” She means it to sound chastising, but he laughs and looks unapologetic—and happy. He looks really, really happy. Rey feels her heart clench and her stomach flip. It’s a caustic reminder of Finn’s words to her during their fight— _you are afraid of wanting anything at all_ —and she certainly feels it now. This man could break her heart so, so easily, and it makes her all the more fearful of telling him that it’s his for the taking.


	10. Tell-Tale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's all about giving things away, really.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What the fuck, it has been more than a month, I officially suck.
> 
> If you're reading this, thank you so much for sticking around and waiting for me to get myself together enough to write. This chapter is shorter than the last few have been, and a little more introspective, but I hope you'll enjoy it all the same. 
> 
> Thank you in advance for reading, commenting, kudos-ing, and twittering. Seriously, it makes my freaking day when people interact with this story, and I can't even tell you how much I appreciate it that there are people out there who want to. I love you all excessively.

Before the night is over, Ben makes Rey come three more times.

The first time, they’ve spent about a half hour with their relaxed bodies twined together from their foreheads to their toes, meeting and parting at intervals as they whisper to one another in the otherwise silent house. Rey is terrified that Leia will return with Luke and Han at any minute, and while she knows it’s absolutely absurd, she can’t quite get past the fear that her boss will come sprinting directly up the stairs to find Rey naked with her son, as if that would be enough to scandalize Leia—the knowledge that her thirty-four year old son has sex with the woman who is, as far as Leia is concerned, his girlfriend. Still, her fear loses out in the end to the temptation of Ben’s bare muscles and beauty marks, his mussed hair, and the innocently tempting way he looks at her through the forest of his dark eyelashes. They’re still spooned together, kissing like they can’t bear to stop, when he lifts her leg over his hip and slips inside her again.

The second time is after the rest of his family have returned from their post-dinner drinks, and Rey honestly does her best to fend him off for a good sixty seconds as he crawls between her thighs and torments her with his fucking glorious mouth. He only tears himself away from her wet center long enough to tease her: “You know, I would take that pillow from you, so I could see your face while I make you come, but I don’t think you can be quiet enough for that.”

She teases him about going for a record when he peaks his head out into the hallway to listen for any signs of wakefulness among the others downstairs before he drags her to the bathroom and into the shower with him, not that she put up much of a fight. It starts with more kisses—heated to scalding by the steam around them and twice as wet with water running down both of their faces. He stands behind her and washes her hair, telling her all of the things he’d spent his evening thinking about her—how radiant she had looked when he found her waiting for him on the porch, how badly he had wanted to kiss her that afternoon on the cliffside, how he still can’t believe she’s there with him, how lucky he feels to be the one with his hands on her now. Even if she had wanted to resist him, which she very much did not, Rey would have been completely powerless to the double threat of his flattery and his wet, firm, oh so naked body behind hers as he raked conditioner through her hair with his thick fingers. The innocence of his actions evaporates the instant his lips find the knot of bone at the top of her spine, and before either of them knows it, she’s bent forward at the hips with her hands braced against the damp wall in front of her while he thrusts himself as deeply inside her as he can manage, both of them biting lips and tongues to stifle their moans under the racket of the running water.

When they return to the bedroom, neither of them bother with clothing of any kind, merely dropping their towels and sliding between the crisp sheets together. Ben pulls her close again, and he doesn’t let her go under the sun streams over the bed from the bay window.

She’s still asleep, and it feels like a luxury to wake up to her like this, the way he hadn’t the day before. He’s torn between wanting to sneak out to bring her breakfast in bed, to spoil her the way she deserves, the way he knows she has never really been, and wanting to stay where he can feel her warm skin against his own until she forcibly removes him from her.

 _It doesn’t have to be the end_ , he tells himself, but he knows all the while that this is the last day that she will really be his, at least for the time being. Rey had reminded him yesterday that of all the planning they had done, they had never bothered to talk about how their arrangement might come to an end. There is a dangerous, hopeful part of him that wants to believe it’s because she’s as eager to prolong it as he is. He has his doubts, though. Rey is a fiercely independent person, this much he knows for sure, and she had told him, back in the bar where this whole thing started, that she didn’t date.

Ben is not foolish enough to believe that he could be lying next to her now if the circumstances were anything different—if Rey did date, they’d never have met as they did. Instead, she’d have turned up to his mother’s party with some other man hanging on her every word, trailing helplessly after her with hearts in his eyes like the lovesick fool he surely couldn’t help being, and she would never have looked twice at Ben. He tries to pretend that he wouldn’t have watched her move around the party with that other man in tow, but even the thought of it turns his stomach.

He'd spent the previous evening taking as much as Rey was willing to give him, desperate to have and hold onto every part of her that he could get his hands or mouth on. There’s part of him that wants to believe that she could grow to feel the same way for him as he does for her, but the larger, more vocal, eternally pessimistic part of him is already sending out warnings that in only a few hours’ time, he will have to let her go and there will be nothing he can do about it.

When she wiggles around in her sleep, not quite stirring to wakefulness, Ben realizes how long he’s been lying there looking at her. He’s still conflicted about giving up his place next to her in bed, but eventually, Ben comes to the conclusion that her waking up to find him staring at her like an enormous creep probably won’t win him any favor. As quietly and motionlessly as he can, he slips from beneath the blanket, lifting himself from the bed. He watches for a minute to make sure that his jostling hasn’t woken her, but Rey seems to still be sleeping. It’s self-indulgent and unnecessarily risky, he knows, to reach out and touch her, but he just can’t help himself. His thick fingers feel clumsy and unwarranted as they brush the hair away from her face. He traces the peak of a knuckle over the curve of her sleep-warmed cheek.

Somehow, until this very moment, his feelings for Rey—as significant and fast-growing as they’ve proven to be—have felt like a possibility. Looking at her now, completely relaxed, already sprawling to take up some of the space he’d just vacated, they feel like an inevitability. It’s as if he should have known as he watched her walk into that bar that she would be something he could never just move on from. It’s more than just her unfailing charm or the impulse she summons in him to be better than he is—she makes him better, just by existing. The knowledge that she’s been there, that someone like her was two-degrees-of-separation away from him for years without his knowledge, it makes him wonder what else life might have to offer him.

It’s not so much that the possibilities flash before his eyes, playing like a film reel in his head. Instead, they hit him all at once. He could have this all the time. He could have a life with someone. He could put himself out there and take all the risks he’s spent his whole life running from.

He could let himself fall in love with Rey for real. It would be altogether too easy. There could be a thousand more nights, a thousand more mornings, a thousand more days of knowing that he isn’t alone anymore, that he doesn’t _have to be_ alone anymore.

It’s this thought that’s still rocking his brain as he goes through the motions of using the bathroom and brushing his teeth. The thought—the possibility—is still nagging at him as he descends the stairs and enters the kitchen. He takes little notice of Han, already sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and the daily paper that Ben isn’t even sure where he managed to get since he seems not to have left the house this morning.

Ben pours himself a cup of coffee and makes his way to the table, taking the seat across from his father.

“Morning, dad,” he says with his lips parting over the rim of his mug.

“Morning, kid. Didn’t expect you up this early.”

“I’m usually up even earlier, actually. I like to run before work, and I try to get into the office early so I can figure out which fires to put out first.”

“You seem to be doing really good there. What’s the place called again? First something?”

Ben chuckles, and even that feels new. Before, the fact that Han couldn’t remember the name of the company Ben helps run would have felt like a personal slight, a testament to his disinterest in his only son’s life. This morning, it doesn’t bother him in the slightest; in fact, it strikes him as a quintessentially fatherly thing to do.

“First Order,” he tells him, and Han bobs his head in recognition. “And yeah, I think I am. I like the work—I like to think I’m good at it. It’s nice being back in New York. And I’ll admit, it’s nice to not have someone breathing down my neck all the time.”

“Never did like that Snake guy.”

“Snoke, dad,” Ben chuckles again.

“Eh, close enough.” They sit in silence for a moment, each sipping their coffee, and then Han lays his newspaper flat over a wide section of the tabletop. He levels his gaze at Ben, and his expression doesn’t give anything away when he asks him, “Things really seem to be falling into place for you, huh? I mean, the job, moving home, meeting Rey. That’s quite the lucky streak you’ve got going.”

“I guess, yeah,” Ben hedges, his suspicions mounting already, the line of his shoulder lifting and tightening accordingly.

“You know, kid, I did a lot of things wrong as a parent—you know that better than anyone, I’m sure. But one thing I never did was bullshit you. We’ve always been straight with one another, even when it was tough.”

“Yeah—?”

“I’m gonna ask you something, Ben, and I expect you to level with me.”

He knows what the question will be, knows it cannot possibly be anything else, but Ben still feels entirely unprepared for the emotional sucker punch when Han asks him, “You and Rey—what’s really going on there?”

Ben swallows compulsively, though he tries to cover it up with large mouthfuls of coffee. His breathing is sharper, heavier, and he knows his father can read him like a book; no matter how hard he tries to play dumb, he’s giving himself away, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.

His whole life, his father has had this pattern—catch him up in a seemingly innocuous conversation, drop a bomb on him, and then sit, staring levelly at him like an infinitely patient, supremely unbothered sphinx until Ben answers him.

He’s doing it now, and Ben knows that however long he declines to answer, Han will just sit there, waiting him out.

He has to answer, so he settles for mumbling a half-assed, “What do you mean?”

Han’s eyes narrow, but his gaze never falters. “Ben, you’re my son. And whether you’d like to admit it or not, you’re a hell of a lot like me, kid. Which is why I know how to spot it when you’re lying to me. Now you wanna try that again?”

“We’re…together,” Ben shrugs, still determined to get out of this conversation with as few words as possible—anything more would surely mean giving away their entire scheme, which he may manage to do yet.

“Not for the last two months, though, right?”

Ben flexes his jaw—another thing he inherited from his father, another thing they both know Han will see straight through. He can’t say anything. If he answers in any way other than the truth, Han will know, and telling him the truth is just not an option. He _can’t_.

“The two of you looked guilty as sin that night at the party, like you were getting away with something big, but I wrote it off, figured it was just that you were coming clean about being together. And then you agreed to come this weekend, and Rey tells us it was _your_ idea, and that certainly seems a little…out of character. And maybe I could let that go, too, but then there’s the way the two of you have been all over each other all weekend long. You’ve always been a private person, Ben, and while I don’t know Rey as well as your mother does, I’ve known her long enough to know that she’s not the sort to parade around with a boyfriend plastered to her back.

“See, I’ve tried to talk myself out of it, convince myself that it’s just new, that you’ve just never really brought a girl home to meet us and maybe you’re always like this. Maybe Rey’s just different when she’s _with_ someone. But the thing is, kid, it adds up. And all of it together—I can’t help thinking that maybe it’s not that we’ve never really seen you with a girl like this, that we’re not used to Rey being in a relationship. The only way I can think of to explain why you can’t keep your hands off her, why she’s looking at you like you’re the only thing keeping her steady, why you both blush like virgins when anybody catches you kissing—the only explanation I can think of is that this whole thing is a hell of a lot newer than you’re trying to pretend it is. And then I’ve gotta wonder why lie about how long you’ve been together, and the only thing I can come up with is that his whole thing is _brand new_. Any part of that you wanna tell me I’m wrong about?”

Ben swallows fitfully once more, but he keeps his lips clenched together. He isn’t ready for the charade to be over, isn’t ready to have to explain himself, or worse, to make Rey explain herself.

“I’ve gotta say, Rey never struck me as the sort to screw with people like this. I don’t understand what the hell she was thinking—”

“It wasn’t her,” Ben interrupts, because the only thing worse than fessing up to his father about his lies is to let Han think that the whole thing was Rey’s doing. He takes a deep breath, squaring himself up for what he knows has to come next. “She didn’t—seek me out or anything. I met her right before the party. I was at the bar across the street from the hotel because I figured things might be a little easier if I were a little less sober. She came in, and it was all just…chance.

“I flirted with her. She was wound up because she told mom she was dating someone so that mom would stop trying to set her up, but she was supposed to bring the guy to the party, and he didn’t exist. We just—we got talking. She told me the story, and as soon as she said she was headed to a birthday party across the street, that her boss had been trying to fix her up for ages, I knew. When she said mom’s name, it was like it all just clicked in my head. It was my idea. I asked her if she would want me to pretend to be her boyfriend.”

“You just figured you’d be a good Samaritan or what?”

Ben shakes his head, still flexing his jaw, his right index finger pressing into the wood of the table so harshly that the entire tip of his finger goes white with the pressure.

“The way she talked about Mom—it was clear that she was important to her. Mom only ever meddles that much when she actually cares about you, and the more Rey told me about her whole situation, the more it made sense to me. She would get her boyfriend, would get to keep pretending she hadn’t lied to Leia, and I—”

“You what?”

“I figured that if you all cared enough about Rey for Mom to be butting into her life, then having her on my arm could really only help my situation. It wasn’t exactly the most comfortable thing, to be back in the city and seeing all of you for the first time at a party with three hundred other people. I thought it would help out the beautiful girl sitting next to me, and that it would make Mom happy enough that for that one night, we wouldn’t have to deal with all the fucking baggage between us.”

“Jesus, Ben.”

Han sighs, shaking his head. He looks like he wants to say more, like he’s trying to formulate the right words in his head, but Ben won’t give him the chance to tell him how wrong he had been to do what he did.

“We thought it would just be that one night, and then Leia brought up this weekend, and I thought we’d just find some excuse not to go. But the more I talked to Rey, the less I wanted a reason not to come. The more I talked to her, the more I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to find another reason to see her, and here was this whole plan, just staring me in the face. It was too hard to resist, and truth be told, I didn’t want to. I knew it would make Mom happy, yeah, but mostly, I just wanted to see her again.”

“And you couldn’t have just asked her out like a normal person? I mean, what the hell did you think was gonna happen, kid?”

“I didn’t. I just thought—it’s what Mom wants, and it’s what I want, and it didn’t seem like there was any downside, you know, because Mom would never have to know. But then we were here, and it’s so easy to be with her.” Ben breathes heavily, sighing in a laughing kind of way as he tells his father, “I hit on her about two minutes after she walked into the bar that night, so it wasn’t like I didn’t realize I was attracted to her. But being with her—Dad, it’s like it just makes sense to me. I’ve never really cared about dating or relationships or whatever, you know, and then all of a sudden, there was Rey. And I guess when we got here this weekend and I realized that as far as anyone was concerned, she was my girlfriend—it was like a get out of jail free card. I realized that I could touch her and kiss her and be with her, as much as she’d let me, and no one would think anything of it, because I was _allowed_.”

“And you never thought that one of us might figure it out? It never even occurred to you to worry about what would happen when the weekend was over, did it?” Han watches Ben shake his head, his lips folded together. “Jesus, you really are just like me, aren’t you?”

A minute later, Ben speaks again, “I don’t regret it, you know. I have no idea what happens next or where we go from here, but I’m not sure it even matters.”

“This whole thing—” Han gestures broadly at the open air around them, “you’re not faking any of this, are you?”

Ben’s movements are minute, but Han’s eyes are fixed on him so closely that he still notices Ben shaking his head.

“Is she?”

It’s a difficult question to answer, because there’s what Ben wants to believe, and then there’s the tremendous doubt that hounds him. “I don’t think so. At least, not all of it. There’s been—We—”

“You had sex.”

His father says it so plainly that Ben is at once embarrassed (despite being nearly 35 years old), surprised, and a little offended at how reductive he makes it sound.

“This cabin’s pretty old, kid, and unlike your mom and Luke, I can hold my liquor. I…overheard, at least some of it. Not everything, thank god, but enough. Besides, there are only so many reasons for someone to be showering in the middle of the night.”

Ben groans frustratedly through the slats of his fingers as they cover his face. “Can you do me a favor and pretend like you didn’t hear any of…whatever you heard? It’s bad enough that I know you know, but I’m pretty sure Rey would be mortified.”

“Believe me, I’m more than happy to pretend I was never exposed to that particular side of my son, or Rey. I’ve gotta ask though—did you guys… was it a, uh, a spontaneous thing? I mean, are the two of you—?”

“Are you trying to ask me if we’re together for real now?”

If it’s possible for a shrug to be gruff, Han’s managed it.

“Honestly? I don’t know. I get the impression she’s not looking for anything serious, but then there are these moments when it doesn’t feel like we’re faking at all—neither of us.”

“What about you? What do you want?”

Ben hesitates, deliberating over a hundred different ways to answer the question. All of them boil down to one answer.

“Her. I want her, Dad. I don’t want it to be pretend, and I don’t want it to be just a weekend. I want to be with her, for us to at least give it a chance. I want to see if I can make her happy. That’s—that’s what I want. I just want Rey to be happy.”

“With you.”

Ben snorts a laugh. “Well, preferably, yeah.”

“You gonna tell her that?”

“I’m not sure she’d want to hear it.”

“Well, judging by—” Ben’s heated glare cuts him off, and Han lifts his hands in a placating gesture. “—by that thing that we’re not going to talk about—it doesn’t seem like she’d object.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I think you should tell her. Rey knows what she wants. She’s not going to do anything she doesn’t want to do. And for what it’s worth, I think you should tell your mother the truth, too.”

“It’s not entirely up to me, Dad. It’s Rey’s decision, too. I’m not going to just throw her under the bus like that.”

“I’m not saying you should. I think she oughta ‘fess up, too. Hell, I know she doesn’t want to disappoint Leia, but your mother’s a big girl, Ben. I’m pretty sure she could handle hearing that Rey doesn’t want to be set up. It’ll be a hell of a lot harder for her to make her peace with the fact that you thought you needed some kind of buffer to show up at your own mother’s birthday party.”

Han’s tone has dipped to something disappointed, and Ben is just about to give Han the same explanation he’d given Rey in the bar that night—that he hadn’t been sure he was even supposed to be invited to the party until a few days before—but suddenly, the stairs creak behind him, and the attention of both men is drawn to the diminutive figure of a bedraggled Rey slumping her way down to join them, still in her pajamas.

Han watches the interaction between his son and the girl he is, _apparently_ , not actually dating. As soon as she steps into the room, Ben is turned all the way around in his seat, a soft, besotted smile tugging his mouth into a form far less familiar on his face than his usual smirk or scowl. He listens to Ben breathe a quiet, “Hey, sweetheart,” as he grins up at her. He takes in the movements that seem to come so naturally to Ben—turning sideways to watch her slow approach, scooting his chair a few inches further from the table, extending his arm out to her, catching her fingertips with his own as soon as she’s in reach, pulling her to sit in his lap rather than one of the other four vacant chairs at the table.

It occurs to Han, in the briefest sort of flicker, that this is their first “morning after” together, and he’s acutely uncomfortable with the notion that he’s unintentional looking in on it. He tries to shift his focus to their interaction rather than lingering on that particular thought.

“You want coffee?” Ben asks with his lips pressed to the side of Rey’s head and his arms settled around her hips. His voice is just above a whisper, as if ignorant of the fact that he would have to rouse Rey to follow through on his offer. Rey shakes her head, curling into Ben’s much larger form and turning to burrow her forehead against his collarbone and neck.

It makes Ben chuckle quietly, and the easy affection between them makes something in Han’s chest twinge. It’s not the first time it’s happened this weekend, but it feels more poignant now as he watches them, Ben having come clean, and Rey too drowsy to be self-conscious.

Ben pecks a kiss against the top of her head, folding his arms infinitesimally tighter around her as she rests against him. She doesn’t do much more than groan in response to any of his questions, but Ben seems content enough with the answers if it means keeping her that close to him. Did she sleep okay? Does she want breakfast? They didn’t wake her, did they? Does she want to go back to bed for a while?

Rey seems determined to stay, though it’s clear that it would take almost nothing for her to fall back asleep. She sits up just enough to be upright, and even that seems to distress Ben mildly. He tracks her with his eyes as she reaches out to take hold of his mug, brings it to her lips, takes a sip, cringes—though whether at the unaltered flavor of the liquid or its tepidness, Han can’t be sure—and then returns the mug to the table and her head to Ben’s shoulder. He watches the way Ben fights off a smile, the subtle turn of his head so that he can bury his nose in her disheveled hair once more and inhale deeply.

Suddenly, it dawns on Han that this is what his son looks like when he’s in love. Because no matter how much Ben had tried to downplay his feelings for the girl, Han knows without doubt that they were immediate and overwhelming. He knows it firsthand. It’s been just over a week that the two of them have even known each other, and yet he’s completely certain as he watches the pair of them together that, for the first time, at thirty-four years old, he is seeing Ben _in love_.

His chest twinges again, and however unnerved he is about the fallout of their hastily constructed and much belabored lie, it’s nice to see Ben like this, and Rey, too, really. He can’t remember Ben being this happy or easy-going since childhood, and even those recollections are few and far between.

So much more like his father than Han had realized or Ben would admit, the kid has managed to fall head over heels for this woman in the span of a week. He can’t really blame him—he’s always regarded Rey as someone special. Then again, he thinks, it makes perfect sense, because Rey has always reminded him a bit of Leia when they had first met—and he knows how Leia made him feel, and that Ben is too much like him for his own good in some ways. Han wonders, as Ben teases Rey with fleeting kisses falling over her face wherever he can reach and Rey squirms but is clearly not at all trying to fend him off, if it will play out the same way.

Han thinks it might be nice if it did. He can’t imagine a better daughter-in-law.

\--

When Ben convinces Rey to let him make her breakfast after all, he lifts her without letting her support any of her own weight, placing her gently in the chair they’ve been sharing. He brings her coffee, and she’s pleased to realize that it’s just the way she likes it, though she doesn’t remember ever ordering coffee in front of him. It only takes a few minutes of slow sips for Rey to feel more awake, and she greets Han as if only just realizing he’s been at the table with them the whole time.

“Good morning, Han. Did you sleep well? Where are Luke and Leia?” she asks.

“Sleeping it off. I don’t imagine either of them will be up for a while yet—they really tied one on last night. Luke and Lor decided they should have some shots, like they’re not both a few decades too old for that. Leia didn’t drink that much, really, but she’s always been a bit of a lightweight.”

Rey nods in understanding, giggling as she remembers office Christmas parties past.

They chat easily while they wait for Ben to finish cooking. Neither of them offers to help, but given the way he keeps chiming in from the adjoined kitchen, they don’t feel too bad about him being excluded from their fun. Han even shares his paper with Rey, a rare enough occurrence that Ben immediately takes notice of it when he walks into the dining room with a stack of plates and cutlery. He winks at Rey and then shoots his father a look that makes him laugh aloud—eyebrows arched sharply, a smug tilt to his mouth, as if to say, “See, you can’t resist her either.”

Ben leaves once more and returns balancing dishes of bacon and eggs and sausage and pancakes and fruit. He lets Rey keep her seat, but he does drag the chair next to hers a few inches closer as he settles beside her. They dig in, and Rey has hardly swallowed her first mouthful of pancakes when she turns to smile widely at him.

“You’re spoiling me, Solo!” she crows, brilliant white teeth on full and stunning display. “I’m going to be expecting you to cook me fancy breakfast every weekend now.”

Ben and Han exchange a look, but Ben is quick to turn away, arching a playful eyebrow at Rey instead of looking at his father.

“I’m not sure pancakes really counts as ‘fancy,’ but I’ll make you breakfast anytime you want, sweetheart.”

Rey’s grin brightens further, despite the seeming impossibility of the feat, and she leans over to kiss his cotton-covered shoulder.

“You’re too good to me,” she whispers, and while Han can hear her, he knows the words are meant for Ben and Ben alone—there’s nothing ostentatious or showy about them at all. The same can be said for Ben’s reply. He turns his head as Rey retreats and manages to capture her lips with the briefest touch, nudging his nose against hers as he replies just as quietly, “Baby, I’m not good _enough_ for you.”

She glares halfheartedly at him, her objection to his claim interrupted by another kiss which Ben pulls back from, reluctantly, to nudge her. “Eat your pancakes.”

\--

When the aging twins eventually straggle into the kitchen, they’ve finished eating and Han has carried the leftovers into the kitchen. Ben and Rey are still snuggled together at the table sipping refills of coffee to try to compensate for how much they’d worn themselves out the night before. Leia appears first, waving off the offer of breakfast of any kind. She looks slightly worse for the wear and yet still somehow immaculate in her polka dotted pajama set and slippers. When Luke shows up, they make him the same offer of leftovers. He complains the entire time he’s eating that the pancakes have grown cold and are turning soggy, but it doesn’t seem to slow him down at all.

They chat amicably, the three older adults filling the couple in on what had happened after Ben and Rey had left Lor’s restaurant the night before. Leia makes a point of saying that both their friends had raved and raved about Rey and what a lovely couple she and Ben make; Rey smiles and blushes, and Ben looks more than a little proud of himself as he pulls her closer and kisses her head again, which in turn makes Han roll his eyes and laugh into his own coffee cup.

Leia asks what time they need to get back to the city, but she seems not to notice the way both Ben and Rey stiffen at the reminder that their weekend of bliss is quickly coming to its end.

“I don’t have anything I need to rush back for,” Ben says evenly. “Sweetheart? Is Finn expecting you home at any certain time?”

Rey keeps her eyes on his face, unsubtly gauging his reaction as she shakes her head.

“Good,” Leia interjects. “Well, we’ll probably leave in time to get back to the city before it gets dark—none of us see as well as we used to, and I never liked driving at night anyway.”

Ben says they’ll probably leave at the same time so that Luke can lock up behind them and everything. Leia insists that they can stay for a while longer if there’s anything else they wanted to do before heading back into the city.

Ben tries to make himself believe she means it when Rey says, “That’s okay, Leia. I’ll make him bring me back another time.”

\--

Rey convinces Ben to go for another walk with her before they leave the cabin. They trek a different path that keeps them closer to the house without sacrificing a view of the water. It feels colder this morning, and while Rey seems happy enough as they plod along with their hands intertwined, Ben has to remind himself not to let the Skywalker melodrama get the best of him and stop equating the bleaker weather with his dimming mood.

Han makes them all lunch with the few remaining groceries they’d brought in that weekend. The meal is spent amicably enough, but they all seem a little subdued as the day wears on.

After lunch, Ben and Rey trek up the stairs to pack their things. And if maybe they’re both eager to have a few more minutes alone in the room that’s been something of a haven for them that weekend, well, neither of them feels the need to say it aloud.

Ben hefts their suitcases onto the side of the bed, and it’s all frightfully domestic as the two of them gather their belongings. Rey blushes to her roots as she folds the dress Leia had bought her only the day before—though it seems like ages ago now—remembering the way that Ben had looked her over when she’d first appeared to him in it, how tenderly his fingers had touched her as he unzipped it, how desired she had felt as it fell to the floor around her ankles. Her movements are slow enough that Ben takes notice; when he sees how far away from the moment she looks, he can’t help smirking down at his luggage.

Rey is a bit baffled by his shameless expression when he picks up and passes to her the matching bra and panties he’d stripped her out of the night before. It’s apparent that he’s pleased with himself, and Rey can’t help rolling her eyes at him, though it’s tinged with a sort of fond exasperation.

The silence is companionable as they go on packing up their things side by side, bobbing and weaving around each other as if they’d done it a hundred times, every little bump of their hips and brush of their shoulders entirely intentional.

When they’re finished, Ben moves their bags to sit beside the closed door of the bedroom. He turns back around to find Rey fiddling with the still-rumpled bedsheets.

“Don’t worry about those,” Ben says quietly, clearing his throat so his voice comes out less feebly when he speaks again. “Luke has a housekeeper who comes in every few weeks to keep the place up. She’ll strip the beds and stuff next time she’s here. No need to make the bed when it’s all going to get pulled off and washed anyway.”

Rey nods her understanding and sits on the edge of the bed delicately. She looks a little lost as she takes in the room around her, not quite familiar to her even after everything that has transpired between them here. She feels it, too.

Ben watches her for a moment, though she seems to take no notice of him in return. The corner of his mouth ticks involuntarily upward in a soft grin as he studies her. He doesn’t know what happens next with them, but this—this is something he knows he can do for her.

He joins her on the bed, taking her hand and using it to pull her closer to him. They’re the wrong way round, but he lays them both on their sides all the same. Her legs hang well over the edge, and Ben’s own feet are only inches from the floor, but neither of them even attempts to move away. For long minutes, they don’t do more than watch the other breathe, but Rey is a temptation that Ben is certain he’ll never really be able to resist. He knows better than to pretend he even wants to try, so he closes the small distance between them and puts his lips to her forehead, her eyelids, her cheeks, the tip of her nose, the underside of her jaw, and finally, her perfectly bowed lips.

Rey inhales deeply as he works her over in this delicate, methodical way. When he pulls back, he’s smiling at her, but there’s something sad in his eyes that Rey isn’t ready to confront yet. Instead, she props her head up on her right hand and extends the other toward Ben.

She pushes Ben’s thick waves away from his face. Tracing her finger over the firm ridge covered by soft sensitive skin, Rey’s mouth broadens, the corners creeping outwards as her eyes fix on his. The movement of her finger doesn’t stop as she whispers, “I like your ears.”

He watches her look him over, and it’s mere instinct, as thoughtless as breathing for him to tell her, “I like the way you smile. I mean, your smile is beautiful, of course, it’s _stunning_. But I like the _way_ you smile. There’s nothing slow about it, you know? It’s just zero to sixty, and then it’s covering your whole face. And it just lights up everything. It’s fucking flawless.”

They lay there, companionable and quiet, exchanging innocent little touches, and Ben would give anything to get to have her stay like this, warm and real and right next to him. And _his_.

“I’m going to miss you, you know,” Rey murmurs.

He wants to tell her, “You don’t have to.” He wants to plead and promise, do or say anything that will mean he gets to keep her when they return to the city, but he doesn’t have it in him. Any bravery he’d been building up was entirely exhausted after their weekend spent playing pretend in the best and worst way possible.

He wants to tell her, too, that Han knows the truth about them—more or less. She deserves to know. But it feels too much like concession anytime he thinks of it—too much like giving her up; too much like admitting defeat. And he just can’t make himself let Rey go in any way he doesn’t have to before he absolutely has to. He only has hours left of this wonderful fantasy with this perfect girl. He has to make it last.

\--

They bid his family goodbye standing next to their cars. Rey thanks them all profusely for the invitation to come along, and for showing her such a great time. Leia kisses both their cheeks promising to see Rey at the office the next day and fairly threatening Ben with an ominous and pointed, “And we’ll see you soon, Ben. Won’t we?”

Ben fends off Han’s attempts to catch his eye but watches surreptitiously as Rey hugs his father without hesitation. It doesn’t escape his notice that Han not only allows it—uncharacteristic enough for him—but returns the gesture.

Ben steals glances at Rey every few minutes as he navigates them through the town and back to the highway, the other three following just behind in Leia’s BMW. She hardly looks away from the window, and he knows that if he weren’t driving, Ben would hardly be able to look away rom her.

The drive home is mostly quiet, both of them downcast by the knowledge that they are about to part ways without any clear notion of what comes next between them. It feels like too much has happened for them to just let go of this whole thing, now undeniable if still unlabeled.

When they do talk, it’s mostly Rey recounting the weekend—how beautiful the cabin and its surroundings were, how much she had enjoyed seeing all of them together and at ease (at least relatively), how interesting she thought Ahsoka and Lor were, how she had had more fun in that one weekend than she had in ages.

He doesn’t tell her about Han. She doesn’t tell him about Luke. For one thing, it feels a little pointless on both counts. It won’t matter what Han knows or doesn’t if their charade isn’t going to continue anyway. It will do no good for Ben to hear that Luke still judges him by the angry teenager he once was. Nothing good can come from those conversations, and both Rey and Ben privately figure as they approach the city that if their time together is about to conclude—at least for the foreseeable future—then there’s no reason to dampen the happiness that’s theirs to share for a while longer.

And despite everything, they both _are_ happy. At least until Ben pulls his car up to the curb in front of Rey’s apartment complex.


	11. Opportunity Knocks; Interference Just Calls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back to reality...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How has it been a month and a half since I updated this thing?! I am so sorry to have kept you all waiting this long, but real life kept getting in the way. I hope this chapter at least sort of makes up for the delay. 
> 
> I love you all and I can't even tell you how happy it makes me to see your comments and kudos on this fic. I still can't believe anyone wants to read it at all, but I'm so, so glad that you do! ❤
> 
> For the lovely Lane, my most constant cheerleader.

Two weeks have passed since Ben and Rey had left the cabin in Montauk and returned to their normal lives. It’s no exaggeration to say that, for Ben at least, nothing has felt quite right since that day, each moment bringing with it some slight unsettling. He hasn’t slept well since then, hasn’t had the patience or attention span for much of anything, his thoughts drifting repeatedly to Rey and her absence from his days making him even more snappish than usual.

He’s thought about calling her, of course. What must be hundreds of text messages have been typed and erased, but every time he’s gotten close to reaching out, he’s talked himself swiftly out of it.

 _She’s busy_ , he tells himself. There’s a reason she wasn’t dating anyone before they met. She may not even miss him the way he does her, and certainly, she couldn’t possibly be half so affected by his sudden non-presence in _her_ life. It had only been a week that they’d spent “together,” and even within the span of that week, they couldn’t have spent a full seventy-two hours together.

Every day he thinks about calling, texting, turning up at her office or apartment with a bundle of flowers and proposing marriage, or something equally as reckless and impulsive. Every day he wakes with her on his mind and falls into a fitful doze the same way each night, and for the eighteen-odd hours in between, he talks himself repeatedly out of forcing his way back into her life when he has no solid reason to believe it’s what she wants. After all, she could have called him at any point in those two weeks as well.

In his more optimistic moments, he tries to tell himself that maybe she’s simply feeling as uncertain as he is. Maybe she’s old fashioned and expects the man to make the first move. Maybe she really has been super busy.

Or maybe she wants to forget all about the weird weekend he’d talked her into spending with him and his crazy family.

There’s no one for him to ask about her—not without giving away their entire scheme—save for Han, and somehow, he feels like that’s a conversation much more likely to yield a lecture than any sort of helpful intel.

So he goes about his business and tries to get back to normal, as if there can be any such hope after having a taste of a life where his days are not populated only by his colleagues, clients, and any baristas or waitstaff he happens to encounter.

It’s absurd, he knows—the way that she never even set foot in his apartment, and it still feels like there’s something missing from it when he comes home each night.

They say that relationships have a half-life—that it will take you half the time you spent with someone to truly get over them. Well, Ben has been without Rey for twice as long as he was with her, and he has yet to feel the faintest hope of fading in his feelings for her. He reasons that maybe it’s because he hadn’t ever really had her to begin with—they’d put on a good show, so convincing that it managed to fool even him—and they’d had sex, but even by the time he drove her home and left her there, she had only begun to be a beautiful possibility in his life. That she had never truly been his in any way that would last is a fact he would much rather not face.

Still, he thinks of almost nothing else.

\--

It’s been a full two weeks since Ben dropped Rey off at the front of her apartment building, and she still hasn’t stopped thinking about it.

They’d lingered in a no parking zone for way longer than was smart, much less polite, but it was like she couldn’t bear to drag herself out of his car and back to real life. Because whatever else their weekend together had been, “real life” feels like it doesn’t even begin to apply.

He had been so sincere—all wide eyes and earnest voice—when he’d thanked her again for coming with him that weekend, cutting her off before she could object that no thanks were necessary. It plays on repeat in her head, the questioning lilt in his voice as he had tried to assure her that he would talk to her soon.

There has scarcely been a twenty-minute window anywhere in her waking hours over the last two weeks that Rey has managed not to think about the way he’d held her eyes as he twined a loose lock of her hair around a thick index finger. She can’t even pretend to make it that long without her thoughts drifting back to the gentle way he’d wrapped his enormous palm around the base of her skull to pull her face to his, the slow and lingering connection of their lips that she was absolutely loath to let him pull back from.

She can hardly be blamed, she reasons, for the fact that she walks into her apartment after having stayed late at the office once again, drops her bag and kicks off her shoes barely inside the doorway, and schleps her way across the room only to flop down onto the couch, her feet falling into Finn’s unsuspecting lap as he sits watching some sitcom or other on one of their numerous shared streaming services (most of which either Poe, Rose, or both mooch off of them).

He valiantly tries to ignore her dramatics, but when she sighs loudly, Finn pauses the show and rolls his head toward her.

“Peanut, why don’t you just call him?” 

“Call who?” Rey asks blankly, as if she doesn’t know exactly who her best friend is referring to.

“Don’t give me that shit, Rey. You’ve been moping around here for the past two weeks waiting for Ben to call you. Don’t you think you’d be a lot better off if you just called him?”

She sighs again, less exaggeratedly this time, and pauses before she answers him. “You just said it yourself, Finn—I’ve been waiting two weeks for him to call and he hasn’t. What does that tell you?”

“That he’s an idiot. But I don’t know what that has to do with _you_ not calling _him_.”

“If he wanted to talk to me—”

“Uh-uh, Rey, no. You are not fourteen years old. You’re the most self-aware person I’ve ever met in my life, and you have absolutely never been the kind of girl who waits for someone else to make the first move. So why should that be any different now?”

“Because!” Rey half shouts, half groans. “What if he really doesn’t want to talk to me?”

“Or what if he does and he’s sitting at home thinking the same thing you are right now? What if he’s spent the last two weeks talking himself out of calling for all the same reasons? What if he thinks you’re the kind of girl who would call if she wanted to have anything more to do with him—which you are—and so he’s just been moping around telling himself that you’re not interested.”

“He’s not that dumb, surely. I mean, I was fawning all over him like a giddy schoolgirl that whole weekend; he can’t possibly think I’m just not interested.”

“You mean you were fawning all over him when you were pretending to be his girlfriend in front of his family? You do understand how that might be a little less than crystal clear for him, right? I mean, there’s a big difference in putting on a show for someone’s benefit and showing actual interest, you know?”

“Of course I know that, Finn, but I’m pretty sure that me having sex with him should have clarified _that_ , at the very least.”

It’s Finn’s turn to hesitate, but mostly because he’s too busy stifling his laughter.

“Okay, that’s fair,” he finally says, his tone still blatantly amused, “but maybe he thinks that didn’t mean anything to you either. I mean, it’s not like you guys had a ton of time to get to know each other before this whole thing started—he probably doesn’t know that you’re basically a hermit. He could think that someone as hot as you is having casual sex all the time with anyone she finds the least bit attractive.”

“That’s ridiculous. Why would he just assume that?”

“I don’t know! I know even less about him than you do! I’m just saying that he _might_. Look, just—at least think about it, okay? This whole sulking around pining for some dude is just not like you. And I don’t like seeing you like this, Peanut.”

Rey nods, sitting up and swinging her feet around to the other end of the couch so that her upper body now leans into Finn. She settles her head on his shoulder, swipes the remote from his hand, and presses play.

\--

Ben is not foolish enough to assume it’s Rey calling when his phone rings the following Wednesday night, but that doesn’t stop the flicker of disappointment that comes with the realization that it is most definitely _not_ Rey.

He doesn’t pick up right away, but he knows he needs to get it before it goes to voicemail. With a sigh, he pokes the little telephone icon on the screen and tries to sound just the right level of put-upon when he says, “Hello, mother.”

A mischievous, “Benny,” is Leia’s only greeting. Ben waits for her to go on, but she says nothing else for a long moment.

“Did you…call for a reason, Mom?” he asks eventually.

“I can’t call my son without a reason?”

It’s little more than a reflex to roll his eyes and sigh at her. “Of course you can, Mother. I just assumed that you _had_ a reason.”

“Well, as it happens…”

Ben chuckles sardonically. “Aaaand here it comes.”

“Hush, you. I just wanted to see if you would come by tomorrow and help your dad fix the washing machine. He keeps insisting he doesn’t need it, but I think he could use a hand.”

“Shouldn’t he, I don’t know, call someone for that or something?”

“You know your father—he thinks working on cars qualifies him to repair any sort of mechanical equipment that has the audacity to break. Besides, why let a professional fix something that he can half-fix?” Ben laughs down the line, and Leia joins him. For a moment, it’s kind of nice. “So, can you stop by? I’ll order something for dinner if you like.”

“Sure, Mom. I’ll come by after work.”

“Oh, thank the lord. I’m very nearly out of clean underwear.”

“And on that note, I am begging you to let this conversation be over.”

“Hey, it could be worse. I could already be going commando.”

“Jesus, Mom.” He knows he sounds whiny and petulant and more than a little aggrieved, but Ben won’t fault himself for this one. “Can I hang up now?”

“I got what I wanted…so yes. We’ll see you tomorrow. Text me if you’re in the mood for anything in particular to eat.”

“Night, Mom.”

“Goodnight, Benny.”

\--

Ben has fleeting thoughts all throughout the next day about how he might be able to get out of actually going to his parents’ house that evening, but none of them are sufficient, much less reasonable. Truth be told, Ben finds himself much less reluctant to go to his parents’ house than he has been for, well, probably since he lived with them. After their weekend at the cabin and the talk he’d had with Han, things between them all are more comfortable than they’ve been since before he left for college. The fact that that was nearly fifteen years ago now is a little mind-boggling if he thinks about it, and it makes him feel slightly ancient, despite the fact that he’s still a few weeks away from turning thirty-five.

Nevertheless, the comparative ease with he and his family does nothing to abate the continuous thought of how much he wishes he had Rey with him as he drives from his office to the house he’d grown up in. When he gets there, he parks in the spot his first car had always occupied as a teenager, the force of habit still in full effect, especially given his distracted state. He heads to the back door that they usually come and go from but realizes he doesn’t have a key anymore and starts knocking.

Almost right away, Leia opens the door, ushering him in and giving a gentle shove in the direction of the laundry room, chattering the entire time. Ben only catches fragments—“such a mess,” “in there all afternoon,” “driving me crazy,” and a host of other things that he doesn’t dare interrupt.

When they reach the laundry room, they find Han hunkered down behind the washing machine, cursing. He’s the very picture of an obstinate husband determined to fix it himself or die trying. The back panel of the machine lays abandoned in the floor beside him, and an array of tools and wires are scattered haphazardly over the tile floor.

“Han, your son is here. Now get out of there and let him help you before you break the damn thing for good.”

Han looks up, nods at Ben, and goes immediately back to squinting into the void of the machine without further acknowledgment of his wife. Ben suspects it’s not the first time that day Leia has come to lurk in the laundry room doorway.

“Want a hand, Dad?”

“That’s not necessar—”

“Han Solo, stop being so damn stubborn and let Ben help! I want this mess fixed and out of my floor before the night is over. And let me just say that if you tear that thing up further, you’ll be buying a replacement—for the _set_.”

Han grumbles something but extends a hand up to offer Ben a wrench, and Leia smiles in a self-satisfied sort of way. Ben shrugs out of his coat and suit jacket, which Leia takes from him, and moves to join his father in the floor, rolling up his shirtsleeves on the way down.

“I’m going to order dinner in a bit. Any requests?”

“Whatever you want is fine, Mom,” Ben says, already half distracted by the machinery in front of him.

Leia rolls her eyes fondly, though neither of the men take notice of her, and heads off through the house. She busies herself for an hour or so before ordering dinner, and then waits forty minutes more for the food to arrive. When it does, she makes her way back to the laundry room, depositing the bags of food in the kitchen as she goes.

She peers in and is delighted to see a significantly smaller mess, several of the parts Han had removed having been replaced and tools subsequently stowed away.

“Dinner’s here,” she informs them. “Wash your hands and come eat while it’s warm.”

That one sentence is enough to make Ben feel like a teenager again, Leia an ever-commanding force in his life. He tries to fend off the thoughts that family dinners had been rare occurrences for most of his youth, and what resentment he can’t stifle, he swallows with the first sip of the wine Leia has poured.

When they’re all seated at the table and the food has been distributed onto plates, Leia doesn’t waste any time broaching the topic that Ben had suspected was bound to come up at some point, no matter how much he hoped he might be proved wrong.

“So, Benny, why didn’t you bring Rey with you tonight?”

It’s not that he doesn’t want to talk about Rey. Truth be told, he wants nothing more than to gush about her, to admit out loud to someone other than the vacancy of his apartment that he _misses_ her. But it isn’t that simple, especially not with Han shooting him knowing looks across the dinner table.

At length, Ben shakes his head. “No reason. I just figured she had better things to do than watch us fix a washing machine.”

“I don’t know, kid, your girl’s pretty handy,” Han says around a mouthful. “She helps out at the garage every now and then—knows her way around an engine.”

“I know. She’s got a real thing for cars.”

As small a recollection as it is, it’s still enough to make a gentle grin steal over his face, remembering her enthusiasm for his car when they’d driven to Montauk.

“She could have come to keep me company,” Leia interjects.

Ben rolls his eyes, but it’s mostly for show. “Don’t you get enough of her at work?”

Leia fixes him with a humorously unimpressed look. “For one thing, I don’t actually see that much of her at work. We’re lucky if we’re able to get lunch together once a month or so. She’s too good at her job for me to need to interfere, and sadly, the same cannot be said for all of my employees. Besides, even if I saw her all the time at work, I would still be glad to have her here.”

“Maybe next time.” He says it without thinking—it’s instinctual, dismissive, and apparently just the opening Leia has been waiting for.

“What about Sunday?” she asks.

Ben chews and swallows his mouthful before he parrots the question back to her: “What _about_ Sunday?”

“Why don’t you two come to dinner on Sunday?”

“Oh, uh—”

Han must know that Ben is about to start floundering for an excuse, because he intervenes right away. “Unless the two of you have plans, of course.”

It’s pointed and not all that subtle, but Leia takes no notice, or at least elects not to comment on it if she does. Ben, for his part, is just about to jump on the out Han has offered him, though he suspects Leia will take some more convincing before she’s willing to let the idea go completely.

Ben hasn’t yet answered when Leia rises from the table, excusing herself to refill her wine glass and start warming the dessert she ordered with their dinner. As soon as she’s out of earshot, Ben feels his father’s eyes fix on him.

“You’re still doing this then?” he asks bluntly.

Ben scoffs a little, takes a sip of his own wine, and fixes Han with an equally steadfast look.

“Yes, Dad. I told you before, this isn’t just my thing. I’m not going to say anything to Mom until Rey and I have talked about it and decided how we want to handle things.”

“I still think you need to tell her, kid. You and I both know it’s going to come out sometime, and the longer you wait, the worse it’ll be. Remember what I used to tell you? Women always find out the truth.”

“It’s not like we did this so we’d have an excuse to lie to her. It’s just…a necessary evil.”

“Nothing about this whole damn plan of yours was ‘necessary,’” Han bemoans, complete with air quotes. “Especially not now that you’re actually sleeping with Rey.”

“Well—” Ben starts, poised to object, but he falters. It’s not like he doesn’t _want_ to be sleeping with her, and if he attempts to explain her absence from his life since they returned from Montauk, he’ll almost certainly be pushing the limits of how long he can expect Leia to stay in the kitchen.

Han scrutinizes him from across the table.

“What’s that look about?”

Ben’s eyes have dropped to his plate, but he rolls them upward now to look reluctantly at Han.

“Are you—You’re not still seeing her?”

Ben shakes his head, dropping his eyes once more.

“Have you seen her at all since that weekend?”

Another no.

“You talked to her?”

Ben doesn’t answer this time—he’s pretty sure Han knows already, pretty sure that’s exactly why he asked.

A loud clanging sound tumbles out of the kitchen causing Ben and Han both to whip their heads in the direction of the doorway just as Leia calls out, “I’m fine, I just dropped the damn pan.”

As they go back to picking at their meals, Ben is hoping that maybe the conversation will have come to a natural sort of end with the distraction. The glance he chances at Han’s face assures him that will not be the case.

Han doesn’t ask anything else, doesn’t speak at all, but he cocks an eyebrow in a deliberate, expectant sort of way.

Ben sighs heavily, taking a longer drink from his quickly diminishing glass. He briefly contemplates escaping to the kitchen to follow his mother’s lead and pour himself a refill, but truth be told, not talking about Rey has been almost as difficult as not talking _to_ her, and Han is offering him a way in.

“I drove her home, I kissed her, and then I spent the next two weeks waiting for her to call me or text me or…anything.”

“I take it you didn’t call her?”

Ben sighs again. “I don’t want to push her to keep going with this if that’s not what she wants. She was pretty clear when we met that night in the bar that she wasn’t interested in being set up or trying to meet someone or whatever. I hate the idea of making her feel like I expect something from her just because we had sex.”

“Don’t you?”

“No!” Ben whisper-shouts defensively. “I _want_ things from her, _with_ her, but I don’t expect to get them. And I certainly don’t assume I’m…entitled to them, or whatever.”

Han hums, observing him carefully, but he looks pleased by Ben’s response. Still, he asks, “You can’t just tell her what you want?”

“Apparently not,” Ben deadpans. “At least, not without it feeling like I’m pushing her to say she wants the same things.”

“And you don’t think she does?”

“I don’t know, Dad. I want to believe she does, but it’s been weeks of radio silence, and—”

“You realize she’s in the same boat, right?”

“What do you mean?” Ben’s tone shifts abruptly from discouragement to confusion.

“I mean,” Han enunciates, exaggerated facial expression accompanying his words, “that she’s probably been waiting to hear from you just like you’ve been waiting to hear from her.”

“I guess, maybe, but—”

“No buts, kid. That radio silence thing works both ways.” He stops for a minute, takes a large bite of his dinner, and chews quickly so that he can go on talking. “So, is it just that you don’t want to ‘push her’” —again, he uses air quotes, fork tucked between the fingers of his right hand— “or is there something else keeping you from calling the girl you’re crazy about?”

Ben is nearly thirty-five years old. He will not blush because his father calls him out on something he already knows and has more than once admitted to.

That does not, however, prevent him mumbling his reply. “I haven’t been able to think of an excuse.”

At this, Han laughs, the sound vibrating like a shock through the white noise around them.

“You need an _excuse_? Ben, were you even _at_ the cabin that weekend? You don’t need an excuse to call her, kid. I’d bet you anything she wants you to; probably been waiting for you to this whole time.”

“You think?” Ben asks, and he hates how uncertain, unconfident his voice sounds in his own ears.

Han rolls his eyes and goes back to eating rather than reply. Ben follows suit, sighing between bites as he thinks over the whole situation and his father’s input again.

When they hear Leia’s trademark kitten heels clacking over the hardwood as she returns to the table, Han takes the opportunity to gruffly remind his son in a hushed voice, “You know, that dinner on Sunday sounds like a pretty good reason to call your girl.”

 _Your girl_. God, Ben hadn’t even realized how much he’d missed hearing that, let alone feeling like there might be truth in it. He looks at his dad, attempting to keep his face—if not blank, then at least restrained. He watches a familiar smirk stretch the corners of Han’s mouth, and he feels an entirely too similar one drawing over his own.

“So, dinner, on Sunday?” his mother asks almost as soon as she regains her seat at the table.

Ben’s eyes flit from her to Han, lingering only long enough to catch the wink thrown his way before they turn back to the eager woman still awaiting the affirmative reply she so clearly expects to get.

“I’ll ask her about it,” Ben mutters, grinning down at his plate. His mood is already infinitely brighter at the prospect of talking to Rey again after the seemingly interminable two weeks without.

Han grins at his response, knowing and pleased, despite the fact that he does little to indicate it, not even stopping as he works on clearing his plate. Leia looks equally delighted by her son’s willingness to comply, and Ben can’t help thinking that even when she’s not here, Rey has power she could never imagine to brighten spirits, to make them all happy with just the possibility of having her around.

His chest feels lighter than it has since she climbed out of his car.

\--

The thing is, though, that for all of the qualities Ben has—good, bad, and ugly—confidence has never been among them, and bravery is one with which he struggles profoundly. He tries numerous times to think of the best way to initiate the conversation he both needs and desperately _wants_ to have with Rey, but every attempt implodes for one reason or another.

He’s going to call her as soon as gets home from his parents’ house, but then he realizes he will have to tell her why and fear he’ll look too eager when he explains that Leia had asked only a few hours before. He’s going to call her the next morning before he goes to work, but figures she probably isn’t up yet. He won’t call at any time he thinks he’s likely to get her voicemail (because the only thing worse than trying to talk to the girl he’s half in love with without making a fool of himself would be trying to leave a message for the girl he’s half in love with without making a fool of himself). He tries on his lunchbreak for two days in a row, only to be interrupted by colleagues who assume he’s working through lunch, the way he usually does. He makes multiple attempts every night in his empty apartment where he has a reasonable level of control over the distractions and interruptions he might face, but still, he never _quite_ manages to get through the entire process—pick up phone, find number, hit call, let it ring without hanging up before she even has time to answer.

Which is how he finds himself in his office on Friday morning, distracted from his work and psyching himself up for another attempt.

 _Tonight_ , he promises himself, _I will call her tonight_.

\--

Rey is making her third trip to the communal coffee pot, despite the fact that it’s nearly always burnt and stale and awful—when someone has bothered to make any at all, that is. It’s been nearly another whole week of nothing from Ben, and she’s getting closer and closer to taking Finn’s advice to call him herself, her pride and anxieties be damned. She’s distracted and frustrated and frankly, as much as she would like to kiss him again as soon as possible, she just misses talking to him—enough that she has almost convinced herself that she could be content with nothing more than that, just having him around to talk to again.

It’s exactly this sort of preoccupation that prevents her from noticing Leia’s approach, in turn causing her to jump about a foot in the air with no more provocation than Leia’s boisterous, “Rey, hi!”

Luckily, she hadn’t gotten so far as to actually pour her coffee. There’s no accidental burn or irreparable stain to contend with, so it doesn’t make much sense for her to be as flustered as she is now. Granted, she hasn’t seen much of her boss since their weekend away—hasn’t had to worry about playing the role Leia thinks she now occupies in her son’s life without the aforementioned son there to help shoulder the burden of the lie they had decided to tell—but it’s still Leia, and Rey knows she has no reason to be this on edge about seeing her now.

“Sorry! I didn’t mean to sneak up on you,” Leia chuckles. “You feeling okay?”

Rey nods, righting herself and proceeding with her intended action, giving herself something else to focus on. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just lost in thought, I guess.”

“Well, would you mind if I distracted you for a minute?”

“Not at all,” Rey replies genuinely, grinning. “What’s up?”

“Really I just wanted to check in about Sunday night. Ben still hasn’t told me if you two can make it or not, and I figured I might have better luck with you.”

Rey can feel the smile dropping off her face, replaced by general confusion. “Sunday night?”

Leia stares blankly at her for only a few seconds before her own expression twists into something longsuffering. “He didn’t tell you,” she says. It’s clearly not a question, but Rey feels compelled to reply anyway.

“I…guess not? What is Sunday night?”

The older woman huffs, adjusting a lock of hair, as if any aspect of her appearance would dare to fall out of place. “I asked Ben about the two of you coming for dinner when he came over to help Han with the washer the other night.”

She looks expectant, so Rey mutters something in the affirmative, as if she knows anything about Ben’s recent comings and goings. She takes a sip of her coffee, cringes at the taste and the temperature, and repeats. Bad coffee is a small price to pay if it gives her a reason to keep quiet.

“He said he would ask you about it, since you didn’t come with him that night. I should have known better than leave it to my son to actually follow through on plans with his parents,” she laughs.

“It probably just slipped his mind,” Rey mutters dismissively. She doesn’t expect she’ll get out of this conversation without giving Leia some sort of answer to her dinner invitation, but Rey has no idea what to say.

“I think you give him more credit than I’m willing to on this one, but sure. At any rate, Han and I would love it if you two would come have dinner with us. If Sunday doesn’t work, we can find another time. I just figured Ben might be more willing to agree if it didn’t mean giving up his weekend with you.”

“Oh, um…” Rey is hesitating, she knows, and knows that Leia must realize it too, but she’s feeling more than a little stuck, not to mention caught off guard. How can she commit to dinner plans on Ben’s behalf when they haven’t spoken in the better part of a month? And even if things with he and his parents are improving, it doesn’t feel like it’s Rey’s place to commit him to something that he might well say no to on his own. “That sounds great, but I should probably…check with Ben. You know, make sure he doesn’t have…”

“An excuse not to come?” Leia asks sarcastically, once again laughing at her own joke. Rey would join her if she weren’t so busy trying to get out of this unexpectedly sticky situation as quickly as possible. “By all means. I wouldn’t want to inflict any more of his pouting than normal on you. Believe me, I know how convincing those big brown eyes can be.”

Strangely, it’s the most pleasant thought Rey has had all day—Ben’s big brown eyes gone wide and pleading. It’s possible she misses him more than she’s even realized.

“I’ll talk to him,” Rey smiles once she tunes back in. “I think I might be able to bring him ‘round to the idea.”

“If anyone could,” Leia teases. “Just let me know what you decide, okay? And really, there’s no pressure. I just thought it would be nice to get together.”

“It would,” Rey agrees. “I would really, really like that.”

“Good. Well, I have a conference call in a few minutes. You should go find yourself some real coffee,” she gestures at Rey’s mug. “That stuff is always godawful.”

Rey glances down at the mug clenched in her hands and giggles, “Yeah, I probably should. This is…pretty terrible, honestly.”

“The worst,” Leia agrees. “Take a break, get better coffee, call my crabby son, and let me know what you two decide, okay?”

“Will do.” Rey waits for Leia to continue on in the direction of her office before moving to the sink and pouring her admittedly horrible cup of coffee down the drain. She rinses out her mug and returns it to her own office, collecting her purse and coat while she’s there. She makes sure she has her phone with her as she leaves, already forming a plan.

\--

Rey walks with her replacement coffee and the impromptu pastry she’d purchased to a nearby area of greenery hardly large enough to be called a park. She perches herself on one of the few benches, despite the fact that it’s really too chilly to comfortably linger out of doors, unwraps her treat and takes a bite, and then sets to digging around in her purse until she can retrieve her phone from the depths.

There’s a small smile on her face as she sips her drink, scrolling through the beginning of her contacts list until she reaches his name. She quickly taps the screen and navigates through a few more until the ringing starts, at which point she lifts the phone to her ear and balances it between her face and her shoulder so that she has a free hand with which to tear off another chunk of pastry.

She’s just finished chewing when she hears his voice for the first time in much too long. Just as well—Rey thinks it’s not entirely unlikely that she’d have started herself into a coughing fit had she had anything in her mouth at the moment she hears his surprised and eager, “Rey?”

“Solo,” she says, trying to sound firm despite the large smile contorting her features. She doesn’t give him time to answer. “You do know that I work for your mother, correct?”

Ben hesitates before answering, and when he does, Rey can hear his confusion. “Y-yes?”

“And you understand that that means that our paths do cross, somewhat regularly even, and that when they do, it generally involves conversation?”

“Rey, what’s going on? Did something happen with you and my mom?”

“Why did you not tell me that your mother wants us to come to dinner this weekend?!”

“Oh, shit,” Ben breathes in a huff, and Rey has to stifle a laugh, determined to keep her tone in check for at least a little while longer.

“Yeah, ‘oh shit.’ I just got completely blindsided about this dinner that we’re apparently supposed to be attending on Sunday night. Did you have any intentions of actually mentioning that to me?”

“Fuck, Rey, I am so sorry. I honestly didn’t even think about her catching you off guard like that. I—I’ve meant to call. I’ve tried to a few times even, but stuff kept interrupting and getting in the way, and I was going to call you tonight to ask you about it, I swear, but I guess that doesn’t really help now—”

“Ben!” Rey finally interjects, unable to restrain her soft chuckling in the face of his frantic rambling. “Ben, breathe. It’s okay—I was just giving you a hard time.”

“I really am sorry, Rey. Seriously, I’ve been trying to call you all week, but I just—”

“It’s fine, Ben. I mean, she did take me by surprise, and it was a little awkward, I guess, but I think I covered pretty well, given that the first I heard of it was from Leia.”

“Rey, I’m—”

“Don’t say you’re sorry again, Ben,” she cuts him off gently. “It’s really okay.”

“Right. Sorry.” It takes a second for him to realize what he’s just said. “Shit, sorry. I mean—”

“Ben!” Rey laughs brightly, and the ambient city noise around her is enough to render Ben’s sharp gasp inaudible to her.

“I’ve missed you,” he blurts, and Rey’s laughter stops abruptly.

There’s a deliberate pause before Rey speaks again, her voice subdued by shyness and uncertainty as she asks, “Have you?”

“God,” Ben sighs, “so, so much. I shouldn’t even try to tell you how much because it would absolutely be embarrassing.”

Rey is fully smiling now, no attempt at restraint anywhere in sight. “I’ve missed you too, Ben. A lot.”

“An embarrassing amount?” Ben teases her—and the answer, were she honest, would have to be an unequivocal yes.

“I can neither confirm nor deny.”

Ben laughs softly into the phone. “I think that’s still better than I had hoped for.”

“Yeah?”

“Honestly? I’m glad to hear you’ve missed me at all.”

“Of course I have, Ben. It’s been almost three weeks!” She pauses, debating whether or not she should go on with what she’d been about to say before deciding that this is as good a way as any to level the playing field of potential humiliation after Ben’s adorable candor. “I was hoping you might call me, but…”

“I wanted to. Really. I started to, at least a hundred different times, probably. But—I wasn’t sure you’d want to hear from me. I guess I figured some part of you would get tired of waiting for me and take matters into your own hands. And when you didn’t call, I just kept convincing myself more and more that it was because you weren’t interested in talking to me.”

His words carry a blend of self-deprecation that makes her want to tell him repeatedly how wonderful he is and playful accusation that makes her want to taunt him some more. “Well just so you know, in future, Ben, assume that I am always interested in talking to you.”

He breathes down the line, steady, heavy inhales and exhales, before he says quietly, “God, sweetheart, that’s so, so good to hear.” He laughs in a huff. “I really should stop talking before I genuinely humiliate myself.”

“It’s pretty cute actually.” Rey says it as if she’s confiding in him with some significant secret.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” They sit quietly listening to each other breathe for a moment until Rey finally asks, “So, Sunday?”

“We don’t have to go,” Ben immediately insists. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to agree just because my mom asked.”

Rey’s not sure how much of that answer is him wanting to reassure her, and him wanting to gently persuade her to give him an out. She’s not all that bothered about it, honestly, as both options are so entirely, endearingly Ben.

“Well, as it happens, I’m not very good at saying no to your mother. Let us remember why I was in that bar instead of her birthday party.”

“Trust me when I tell you, Rey, that that is something I will definitely never forget.”

Rey is only grateful that he can’t see the faint blush heating her cheeks—and why in the world, she asks herself, has three weeks away from him made her seemingly so much more susceptible to his middling attempts to flirt with her?

“You really want to go then?”

“Why not?” Rey chirps. “I like your parents, remember? Besides, I’m sure the food will be good. And I guess I wouldn’t absolutely hate spending the afternoon with you.”

Ben chuckles. “You think you might be alright with that, huh?”

“I think I might.”

“Well, I might have to see if I can do anything to get you past ‘might.’ I’m thinking more along the lines of ‘yes, please, Ben, I’m desperate to see you,’ but maybe that’s aiming a little high, huh?”

Rey decides it’s her turn to make Ben blush—and she is absolutely certain she knows just how to do it.

“Maybe if I had something more than dinner to look forward to…”

“W-what did you have in mind, sweetheart?” Ben stammers.

“I wouldn’t say no to a goodnight kiss.”

“What about a kiss ‘hello’? And a kiss ‘I missed you’? And a ‘how did I go three weeks without kissing you’ kiss?”

“You’re giving me very high expectations, Mr. Solo.”

“If I kissed you as much as I want to kiss you, we would never make it to dinner.”

“That is…a very tempting offer, but I don’t think your mother would find it quite as enticing.”

“Oof,” Ben groans. “Maybe don’t mention my mother when I’m thinking about putting my tongue in your mouth, okay, sweetheart?” Rey laughs, and Ben sighs again. “Now I just have to make it to Sunday, huh?”

“It’s been almost three weeks, Ben. Two more days won’t kill you,” Rey insists, despite the fact that she’s having similar thoughts herself.

“Fair enough. But don’t blame me if I don’t make it past the doorway without kissing you.”

“Promises, promises,” Rey giggles. “I guess I’ll let your mother know that we’re in.”

“Let me know what time you want me to pick you up, okay? I’ll see you Sunday?”

“Can’t wait.”

Ben and Rey exchange reluctant goodbyes, and she finds herself smiling the whole time she finishes off her considerably-cooler coffee and pastry.

When she gets back to her building, she stops by Leia’s office to let he know that she and Ben will be there for dinner on Sunday.

As she heads back to her own office and shucks out of her coat, she types out a text to Ben:

**Leia wants us there at 5. 52 hours and counting, love.**

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on twitter! @jennyb_b8


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